In news that has simply blown our Ryan Gosling-loving minds, George Clooney almost played Noah in The Notebook instead.
While it’s fairly unfathomable for fans of the film to imagine anyone else playing the part, it turns out George Clooney was very close to being the one we thirsted over in the role.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, George Clooney revealed that he going to star in The Notebook along with Paul Newman as the older Noah.
“I was going to do a movie years ago called The Notebook, that Ryan Gosling actually did… I was playing the flashback and Paul Newman was the old guy,” he said.
Clooney revealed plans fell through when he realised Newman was too famous for him to realistically portray a younger version of.
“Paul and I talked about doing it, and we were sitting there one day and I was looking at him and I go, ‘I can’t do this movie, Paul,'” he said.
He continued: “He was like. ‘Why?’ I was like, ‘Because everybody knows what you look like at 30 years old. You got blue eyes, I got brown eyes. You’re too famous at 30 for me to be playing you at 30, it’s never gonna work.’ And he’s like, ‘I guess you’re right.'”
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“We bailed out and I think 10 years later they made it,” he concluded.
The revelation comes ahead of Clooney’s latest film The Midnight Sky, which stars Ethan Peck as a younger version of his character.
Along with his starring role, Clooney also directed the film, marking his seventh directorial effort.
Although the film is of the science fiction genre, Clooney revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair that the events of 2020 have made things feel “less fictional.”
“[When filming wrapped] there wasn’t the pandemic, and we hadn’t set the whole West Coast on fire,” he said.
“I mean, the picture we show of Earth [in the movie] doesn’t look that much different than the satellite pictures of the West Coast right now.”
The Midnight Sky is set to premiere on Netflix in December.
