Being George Clooney Is Harder Than It Looks Being George Clooney Is Harder Than It Looks

He is making his Broadway debut with a stage version of his 2005 movie “Good Night, and Good Luck.” He’s ready, but also terrified.

George Clooney has been sneaking outside to smoke.

Not like his friend Barack Obama used to, when he was running for president and his wife, Michelle, was after him to quit. Clooney doesn’t even like smoking.

“I had to get better at inhaling,” he said. “I go outside so the kids don’t see and smoke a little bit.” He plans to switch to herbal cigarettes when he makes his Broadway debut next month in a stage adaptation of his 2005 movie, “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

Smoking has been unpleasant, he said, because in his Kentucky clan “eight uncles and aunts all died of lung cancer — it’s a big deal.” He noted that his aunt Rosemary Clooney, the torch singer and movie star, was 74 when she died in 2002 from complications of lung cancer. “My dad’s the only one that didn’t smoke, and he’s 91.”

Clooney, looking slender in a black Theory shirt and navy pants, sat on a rose-colored couch late last month at Casa Cipriani, a hotel at the bottom of Manhattan. He would sit there for the next five hours, until the sun set over the bay, not bothering with lunch, not looking at his phone, not checking with his minders, just spinning ensorcelling tales about love, Hollywood and politics like a modern-day Scheherazade.

Unlike in the film, where he took on the nonsmoking role of Fred Friendly, the producer of the CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, on Broadway Clooney will play Murrow himself, who had a three-pack-a-day habit and died in 1965 at the age of 57 of complications from lung cancer. A decade before his death, Murrow was one of the first to report on links between smoking and lung cancer on his show, “See It Now.” It was the rare episode in which he didn’t light up.