George Clooney Confesses He Didn’t Like Being A Bachelor: My Life Was ‘Un-Full’ Until I Met Amal

Though he was once considered Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor, George Cooney said that the single life left a ‘huge empty space’ in his heart – one that wasn’t filled until he met the woman he’d make his wife, Amal.

After George Clooney divorced actress Talia Balsam in 1993, it looked like he would spend the rest of his life as a bachelor. “I was like, ‘I’m never getting married. I’m not gonna have kids,’” George, 59, said in a new interview with GQ. After the split, George was romantically linked with a handful of A-listers, from Renée Zellweger to Krista Allen to Stacy Keibler. George, he tells GQ, had thought he had it all figured out. “I’m gonna work, I’ve got great friends, my life is full, I’m doing well. And I didn’t know how un-full it was until I met Amal [Clooney]. And then everything changed. And I was like, ‘Oh, actually, this has been a huge empty space.’”

George met Amal (née Alamuddin) in 2013, and it was love at first sight. The couple was married the next year. Marriage, George told GQ, has changed him in surprising ways because, he’d “never been in the position where someone else’s life was infinitely more important to me than my own. You know? And then tack on two more individuals, who are small and have to be fed.…” Those mouths are twins Alexander and Ella, who George and Amal welcomed in 2017.

During the conversation, George spoke about how he’s been keeping isolated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Alexander has asthma, and George, at age 59, is at a high risk of catching the coronavirus. The Ocean’s Eleven star says he hasn’t left his house for most of the year, but he’s made the best of it. “I cut my own hair, and I cut my kids’ hair, and I’m mopping it and vacuuming and doing the laundry and doing the dishes every day,” he told GQ. “I feel like my mother in 1964. You know, I understand why she burned her bra.”

George has been keeping busy with The Midnight Sky, a new movie that he produced, directed, and starred in. He tells GQ that he’s been editing The Midnight Sky from his home while his wife has been busy elsewhere. “Yeah, my wife is literally— Like, today she’s in the middle of sort of standing up against the British government, you know, deciding that they’re gonna break international law,” George tells GQ, refereeing to how Amal – a decorated and celebrated human rights lawyer – resigned from her post as the United Kingdom’s special envoy on media freedom in protest of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s intention to pass a Brexit-related bill that “would violate international law and breach British treaty obligations,” per GQ.

“So she had to retire as the envoy, and she’s in there doing that,” said George, proud of his wife. “And I’m in here doing this interview.”