“This never felt like a story about a movie star to me,” George Clooney says as we sit down at West Hollywood’s Sunset Tower hotel to record an episode of The Hollywood Reporter ’s Awards Chatter podcast — on which he last guested in 2019 — ahead of the release of Jay Kelly , the new Noah Baumbach dramedy in which Clooney plays the title character, a movie star experiencing an existential crisis. “This felt like a story about almost every one of us who has had to balance work and life.”

Even so, Jay Kelly — which has been a hit on the fall film fest circuit en route to its theatrical release on Nov. 14 and Netflix debut on Dec. 5, and for which Clooney could earn the fifth acting Oscar nomination of his distinguished career — raises a lot of interesting questions about

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