George Clooney reveals the moment he realised he wanted kids

‘I knew everything was going to be different,’ the actor said

Amal and George Clooney (PA Archive)

George Clooney has said that meeting his wife, Amal, made him change his perspective on marriage and children.

“Listen, I didn’t want to get married. I didn’t want to have kids,” the 60-year-old actor told Marc Maron on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast.

“And then this extraordinary human being walked into my life and I just fell madly in love. Then I knew from the minute I met her [Amal] that everything was going to be different.”

Clooney continued: “I didn’t know I’d have twins. There is that moment when you go to the doctor and they pull out this piece of paper which is a sonogram and they go, ‘Here’ and you go, ‘It’s a baby boy.’ I’m like, ‘Baby boy, fantastic. And then they said, ‘And the other one is the girl’ and I was like, ‘Oh s***.’”

He added that Amal’s sister has twins and that despite being “gobsmacked” when he found out, he “loves” having two children the same age now.

Clooney’s twins, Ella and Alexander, both four, were born in 2017. The actor also told the podcast host about when he and Amal, 43, first discussed having kids.

“So we’ve been married for about a year and we were at a friend’s house, and they had a kid there which was loud and obnoxious and I was like, ‘Holy s***’,” he explained.

“We went outside for a walk. And she’d never thought about it, really. And so then she said, ‘We are awfully lucky in life.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, we are lucky we found each other. She said, ‘Seems like that luck should be shared with some other folks.”

The actor added that he thought about it for “maybe a minute” and realised neither of them had “made a decision” about kids at that point.

"And then I just said, ‘Well, I mean, if you’re in’ and she said, ‘I think we should try’,” he continued. “I have to say it was very emotional because I really was convinced that wasn’t my lot in life and was comfortable with that.”

Clooney later explained in the podcast that he’s “aware of the danger of celebrity” with his kids and recalled his own childhood where he moved around a lot.

"I learned to be scrappy because of that,” he said. “You can put me in any situation, I can survive. I can survive anything. I had to make sure that that’s something that our kids get. That’s important to me.”