They are two heavyweights of a dying genre.
George Clooney (61 years old) starred in his last romantic comedy in 2003,
Intolerable Cruelty
.
Julia Roberts (54) did it in 1999, when she added two of her biggest blockbusters:
Runaway Bride
and
Nothing Hill.
That was when the genre was at its peak.
That year, 11 of the 50 highest-grossing films in the United States were romantic comedies.
In 2021, no production of this genre entered this
ranking
.
The epic adventures of superheroes seem to interest much more than the love affairs of a bunch of beautiful, white and rich people.
The trend, however, could change taking a look at this year's collection.
Ticket to Paradise
does not intend to revolutionize the genre, but the box office.
The film counts for this, as the canon marks, with two stars of undeniable charisma and more than demonstrated chemistry.
Clooney and Roberts have shared the screen in five films in the last 20 years.
She's America's girlfriend, but she's amazingly good at playing the ex-wife.
She did it already in her first movie with Clooney,
Ocean's Eleven
(2001).
She does it again in this film in which a divorced couple travels to Bali (exotic places are common places in the genre) to try to prevent their daughter's wedding (marriage sabotage, another classic that Roberts herself has executed some than again).
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In fiction, his dialogues work based on wit, taunts and playful insults.
The kind of funny, lazy tone used by two very confident friends in real life or two divorcees in a movie.
It is also the tone they use to question each other in the videoconference with the press this Thursday to present
Ticket to Paradise.
He wears a blue polo shirt and a huge watch.
He is dark and relaxed, as if he had just arrived from a long vacation at his mansion in Lake Como, Italy, together with his wife, the lawyer Amal Clooney, and their two children, Alexander and Ella, five years old. .
She wears a white dress and an
oversized
jacket .
Her hair falls in two matted strands to the sides of her face, like half-closed curtains.
When she flashes her famous trademark smile, the curtains seem to part and illuminate the room, an anonymous place that could be an expensive hotel or a cheap palace.
The first question, of course, is about their friendship.
"It's fun working with friends," he says, adding a dramatic pause.
And with Julia.
Roberts opens the curtains, laughs heartily, and picks up the glove.
- This is because of separation anxiety.
Now I'm going to catch a plane and we're going to separate and that's why he's doing this to me.
The director, Ol Parker (
Mamma mia!
) and the rest of the cast laugh out loud.
The atmosphere is relaxed.
It helps to find yourself in a virtual press conference, the questions previously filtered and voiced by a presenter, the microphones of the journalists muted.
It's all under control.
Actors Julia Roberts and George Clooney at the Annual Critics' Choice Awards in Santa Monica, California, in January 2006. Kevin Winter (Getty Images)
He wasn't during filming.
The
paradise
referred to in the title is Bali (Indonesia).
But the film was actually shot in Australia, and his time there was more like
hell
.
This is one of the countries that has adopted stricter confinement policies against covid-19.
And part of these measures coincided with the shooting.
The team practically lived in a bubble, something that was not so terrible for Clooney, who was there with his wife and children, but for Roberts, who was alone.
"The Clooneys saved me from complete loneliness and despair," she acknowledged in a recent interview in
The
New York Times .
.
They lived next door, so they had coffee together in the mornings and kept each other company.
So much so that the actor's children ended up calling Roberts "Aunt Juju."
Listening to them talk, it seems that they have known each other all their lives.
And it is a bit like that.
They met for the first time on the set of
Ocean's Eleven.
“We sat on the hotel floor, ordered hamburgers and joked around for about five hours,” recalls Clooney.
"Then we said, 'Okay, let's get started.'
They started and things went extremely well.
The chemistry between the two was instant and carried over into real life.
They are friends ever since.
"We know each other pretty well," says Roberts, staring at his partner.
So much so that, they say, they don't even have to rehearse before recording a scene together.
Ol Parker knew that this chemistry could be the engine of a romantic comedy, a genre in which both had managed with ease separately (he with Catherine Zeta-Jones or Michelle Pfeiffer; she with Richard Gere or Hugh Grant), but never together. .
So when he wrote the script he did it with them in mind.
So much so that the characters, in their original version, were called Georgia and Julian.
When the libretto was finished he sent two copies to the performers and waited patiently for them to say yes.
“So I called Julia and asked her, 'Have you read it yet?'” explains Clooney.
“And her: 'I'm doing it right now.'
I told him, 'It will only work if you do it.'
And she replied: 'I think the same'.
And, luckily, it was."
Not only were they encouraged to act, but they ended up becoming executive producers of the film.
"I think when you've been in this business for a while, you find other ways to participate," says Clooney.
"And you stop worrying about the
casting
director noticing that you're getting older."
Age is a topic that is addressed in the film and that they also analyze in the interviews.
Both have aged in front of the camera, and are doing so with graceful resignation.
Roberts' phrase from a few years ago is famous: “There is only one alternative to aging and, personally, I prefer to age.
What you have to do is accept it.”