George Clooney recalls time Boris Johnson compared him to Hitler: ‘It still makes me laugh’

‘Bit of a stretch,’ joked the actor

George Clooney has recalled the time Boris Johnson compared him to Hitler.

In 2014, Clooney was in the UK to promote his film, The Monuments Men, about soldiers in the Second World War who were protecting European artwork from Nazi looters. The actor said he believed that the United Kingdom should return the Parthenon marbles to Greece.

“And that,” Clooney told The Guardian in a new interview, “was when your current prime minister compared me to Adolf Hitler. Boris Johnson literally compared me to Hitler.”

Giggling, he added: “It still makes me laugh. Bit of a stretch. But he said my comments about the Marbles made me an art thief like Hitler was an art thief.”

At the time, it was reported that Johnson, who was the mayor of London, had said: “Someone urgently needs to restore George Clooney’s marbles. Here he is plugging a film about looted Nazi art without realising that Goring himself had plans to plunder the British Museum.

“And where were the Nazis going to send the Elgin marbles? To Athens! This Clooney is advocating nothing less than the Hitlerian agenda for London’s cultural treasures. He should stuff the Hollywood script and stick to history.”

Clooney gleefully told The Guardian that Johnson’s comments had helped him bond with his wife, the lawyer Amal, who he had just begun dating at the time and who had coincidentally been hired to advocate on Greece’s behalf for the return of the Marbles.

“It was kind of great for me!” he said. “Because Amal and I were secretly dating at the time. No one knew. There was all this uproar about what I’d said. And I was meeting Amal for dinner that night. She goes to me, ‘Y’know I’ve worked on that case? So listen. Here’s a lot of stuff you should say.’ She told me about Unesco rulings. Gave me all this info.”

Clooney joked that he should thank Johnson. “I’ll send him a thank you note,” he said. “And a comb.”

The actor is currently promoting his film, The Midnight Sky, which he stars in and directs.

He recently revealed that he was taken to hospital with extreme stomach pains after losing almost two stone for the Netflix sci-fi movie.