The madness of King George

George Clooney is tired of hearing people say, "We have to accept [U.S. President Donald] Trump and move on."

"No, man! No!" he hollers down the phone last Saturday afternoon, from what he Rat-Pack-ishly refers to as "sunny California."

"You've got to stay outraged. You've got to stay mad; you've got to stay involved. If you're not, then you're saying, 'This is now normal.' You're saying, 'It's fine to say the things he says,' like right now, going after the congresswoman" – Frederica Wilson, the Florida Democrat and cowboy-hat-bedazzler who accused Trump of being insensitive during his call to war widow Myeshia Johnson.

"You have to say, 'Wilson had a right to be on the call, because the young man who was killed [Sgt. La David Johnson] was like a son to her,'" Clooney continues. "And you have to say, 'Trump and [John] Kelly came out and said complete falsehoods, and then denied it even after we looked at real videotape.' How do you deny that? That's the thing that's most disturbing to me right now. The very idea of facts is being challenged. When I was growing up, we had three networks; they started with the same fact base. With that, we made our decisions. Now, we go to the place that best represents the facts that we want. We're not even able to discuss the issues. That worries me."

It's important to note that although Clooney is serious here, he never loses his cool. There's an audible, can-you-believe-this head shake in his delivery, a laugh-or-die smile in his voice. He's an overtly liberal guy, he's just directed an overtly liberal film, Suburbicon, and since he's been handed this megaphone, he's going to use it to taunt the class bully.

Candour-plus-charm was Clooney's modus operandi in 1994, when, after 10 years of failed TV pilots, the doctor drama ER made him a star. It remained thus as he rose from Hollywood's puckish prankster to its elder statesman; and from rake to committed husband and father, with the human-rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin Clooney and their (almost) five-month-old twins, Ella and Alexander.

I first interviewed him in 2000, as a live-TV production he'd put together of the Cold War-era drama Fail Safe was about to go to air, and the stuff his co-stars said about him then is true today: that he's made a career out of marrying friendship, loyalty and work (Noah Wyle). That he makes everyone around him work hard, but with a smile on their faces (Hank Azaria). That the years he spent hovering, his face pressed against the windowpane of fame, gave him both a permanent desire to seize every moment and an allergy to hype (Richard Dreyfuss).

At 56, Clooney knows how to work it, whether "it" is a room full of politicians addressing a humanitarian crisis in Darfur, or a single phone call out of the scores he'll make today to promote his film. He trills out your name as though he knows you, teases you like a brother, and then – correctly reading his listener – offers disarmingly sweet things about his new-found family life.

After years of insisting that he had "no interest in having replicants," Clooney met Amal, and "for the first time, I felt that having a family was something I wanted to do, with her," he says. "It wasn't, 'Okay, I'm 56, it's family time.' I met Amal, we started talking and we both felt we've had an awful lot of good luck in our lives, and it would be fun to share that luck. And suddenly, here I am with two kids who just switched to solid food three days ago, which is a life-changing experience."

He guffaws. "The life-changing experience is the first time you open a diaper after they've eaten solid food. I don't know how it goes from carrots to that, but it's shocking." The rushing love of parenthood didn't surprise him "because I've seen it in all my friends," he says. "But it sure is a welcome feeling."

When Clooney was 10, his father, Nick Clooney, the variety host and newsreader, asked him to name 10 big stars from the 1920s. He couldn't, and ever since, he's been acutely aware that even the uberfamous get 80 years, tops. It's why he did seven films while pulling 12-hour days on ER. It's why he once chose a movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, over a relationship (with the model Céline Balitran – not a terrible choice, since his relationship with the Coen brothers has been lasting and fruitful).

It's why his most interesting performances are in films such as Michael Clayton, whose characters acknowledge that luck doesn't always hold, especially if there's something hollow at their core. And it's why, now that he's hit it as big as one can, Clooney uses his cachet on projects that mean something to him – most recently, by directing Suburbicon.

Opening on Friday, Suburbicon is an uneasy, not entirely successful mash-up of two elements: a decades-old Coen brothers script about Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon), a seemingly bland but secretly brutal family man who stages a home invasion to get rid of his wife (Julianne Moore) to be with her twin (also Moore); and new material written by Clooney and his frequent collaborator Grant Heslov, in which Lodge's neighbours viciously torment the Meyers, an African-American family who had the audacity to movie into their lily-white enclave. It's meant to be a black-comedy version of U.S. current events, as hate-mongers whip up misplaced outrage and miss the real rot right under their noses.

Even before Trump was elected, Clooney was hearing "a lot of conversations scapegoating minorities, of the kind that I heard when I was growing up in Kentucky."

Then he stumbled across a documentary, Crisis in Levittown, about a 1957 uproar in a planned community near Philadelphia, and heard the same echoes: Levittown's architects, brothers Bill and Alfred Levitt, restricted home sales to "those of the Caucasian race." When Bea and Lew Wechsler, a Jewish couple, resold their home to Daisy and William Myers, an African-American couple, the community erupted in harassment and mob violence. The Myers stood their ground, and the harassers eventually were criminally charged.

"It's important when we hear conversations that we find outrageous to remind ourselves that it's not the first time we've heard it," Clooney says now. "That these things aren't new. The best way to survive them is to point them out, and even sometimes make fun of them. You really know you're in trouble when you're the joke."

Social satire comes with risks, however, and Clooney takes a big one in Suburbicon: To show that the community doesn't individuate the Meyers, his film doesn't, either. The characters, "Mr. and Mrs. Meyers" (played by Leith M. Burke and Karimah Westbrook), aren't given first names, and hover perilously close to "Anonymous Noble Black Person Nos. 1 and 2."

"Yeah, I saw that in a couple of reviews," Clooney says. "But let's take this into Storytelling 101, the best possible version, To Kill a Mockingbird. You don't go home with Tom" Robinson, the black man accused of raping a white girl, whom Atticus Finch defends. "To think I'd be the expert on telling the Meyers' version of this story would be presumptive. … What I am suited for, having grown up in the 1960s in the [U.S.] South, is to be able to talk about white older men being afraid they're losing their place in society because of immigrants or people who don't look like them. And I liked that Suburbicon is set in the north. The north loves to feel it didn't participate in racist behaviour. But of course it did."

In 1970, when Clooney was 9, he was aware of racism: "Restaurants would say, 'Please don't wear open-toed shoes or shirts with no collars,' but they'd only enforce the rules with black people," he says. "But the more overt stuff – 'Whites Only' signs on fountains and restrooms – that had been painted over. We felt as if things were moving in the right direction, that it would be possible to be post-race. Of course, it wasn't, by any stretch of the imagination, but that's what we all felt at that moment."

Doesn't he mean, that's what privileged white people felt? "Exactly, of course," Clooney replies. "But I think if you asked most African-Americans at the time, they would also say they felt things were moving in the right direction – the civil-rights movement was widespread, laws were changing, things would continue to improve. Then it stopped.

"You can never underestimate the ability of bigotry and fear to find a way to thrive," he continues. "If it's not with one minority it will be with another. The idea that someone who doesn't look like you is taking your job away or wanting to marry your daughter, it's just part of mankind. I've seen it in lots of different societies around the world. In places I've been in sub-Saharan Africa, lighter-skinned people pick on darker-skinned people. It is disheartening, but all you can do is keep railing against it."

Speaking of railing against harassment, has the self-immolation of Harvey Weinstein, the producer/alleged serial-sexual-assaulter, led Clooney to any new realizations or vows? (Weinstein produced Clooney's directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.) "The realization is that this man was a serial predator and assaulter," he replies. "What I hope results from this is that women feel safer coming out, and men feel it's much more dangerous to try to behave like that."

So Clooney didn't know about Weinstein's predation? "Harvey would tell me things like he'd had an affair with some actress," he says. "But to believe that would be to believe that this woman – who, often, I knew – was willing to have an affair with Harvey. Which I didn't. I thought he was just full of shit. But this whole other thing – I can't tell you how infuriating it is. The people who helped him, it's infuriating they were allowed to do that."

Doesn't Clooney believe that many of Weinstein's enablers felt they had no choice? "Yeah, but there are other people," he says. "Sharon Waxman" – the former New York Times correspondent who founded the media news site The Wrap in 2009 – "said recently on CNN, 'The Times killed my story on this 10 years ago.' I think, 'Okay, but you've had The Wrap for eight years. Why didn't you write that story? I would have liked to have known. I would have liked to have known that the guy I was producing a movie for was assaulting women.

"And I'd like to know if you were taking advertising dollars from him while you knew that story," Clooney goes on. "There's a piece of journalism that should be done."

Proof that even the luckiest man alive can stay outraged, and make it work for him.