George Clooney Reveals Why He Wrote That Op-Ed Calling on Joe Biden to Drop Out of Presidential Race

• George Clooney looked back at his July 2024 op-ed for The New York Times, in which he urged Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential race

• In a new interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, the two-time Academy Award winner called the decision to write the essay his “civic duty”

• “You have to take a stand,” Clooney said when discussing freedom of speech. “If you believe in it, take a stand.”

George Clooney is reflecting on his decision to urge former President Joe Biden to step down from the 2024 presidential race.

The two-time Academy Award winner, 63, revealed in a new interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on The Lead that he felt writing his July 2024 op-ed for The New York Times — titled “I Love Joe Biden, But We Need a New Nominee” — was a “civic duty.”

In the essay, Clooney urged the White House to consider the impact of keeping Biden, then 81, on the ballot and pulled his support for his presidential campaign. The move came just weeks after he co-hosted a re-election fundraiser for the then-president. The op-ed also followed Biden’s frail performance against President Donald Trump in the June 27 presidential debate.

“I don’t know if it was brave,” Clooney told Tapper. “It was a civic duty because I found that people on my side of the street — I’m a Democrat, I was a Democrat in Kentucky so I get it. When I saw people on my side of the street not telling the truth, I thought it was time to…”

After Tapper asked Clooney if people were “still mad” at him over the op-ed, he replied, ‘Some people, sure.”

“It’s OK. You know, listen. The idea of freedom of speech, the specific idea of it, is you can’t demand freedom of speech but don’t say bad things about me. That’s the deal,” the Wolfs star said. “You have to take a stand. If you believe in it, take a stand. Stand for it. Then deal with the consequences. That’s the rules.”

“So when people criticize me, they criticize me because of my stance against the war 20 years ago,” he added. “Some people picketed my movies and they put me on a deck of cards. I have to take that. That’s fair. I’m OK with that. I’m OK with criticism for where I stand. I defend their right to criticize me as much as I defend my right to criticize them.”

Related: George Clooney Praises Joe Biden’s ‘Selfless’ Decision to Drop Out of the Presidential Race: ‘He Gets All the Credit’

In the essay, Clooney referred to himself as a “lifelong Democrat” who co-hosted the “single largest fund-raiser supporting any Democratic candidate ever,” writing that the Biden at the fundraiser “was not the Joe ‘big F—— deal’ Biden of 2010” — calling him “the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”

“I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced,” Clooney wrote, adding that “the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time,” in reference to Biden’s age.

Weeks after Clooney’s op-ed, Biden announced on July 21 that he was dropping out of the race and gave then-Vice President Kamala Harris his support. Clooney later called the move “selfless.”

“The person who should be applauded is the President who did the most selfless thing that anybody has done since George Washington,” Clooney told journalists at the 2024 Venice Film Festival when asked about the “impact” of his essay back in September.

“All of the machinations that got us there, none of that’s going to be remembered, and it shouldn’t be,” he added. “What should be remembered is the selfless act of someone who did the hardest thing to do. You know we’ve seen it all around the world, and for someone to say, ‘I think there’s a better way forward,’ he gets all the credit, and that’s really the truth.”

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Elsewhere in his latest conversation with CNN, Clooney — who recently made his Broadway debut in Good Night, and Good Luck — spoke about Harris’ “difficult campaign” and the future of the Democratic party. He noted that he would’ve liked to see a “quick primary” before she accepted the ticket and named governors including Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and Maryland’s Wes Moore as politicians the party might have rallied around.

“We have to find somebody – rather soon,” he told CNN of the party. “It’s our job now to put together a proper team to stand up.”

Clooney, who stars as Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck, made his Broadway debut at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City on April 3. The play, an adaptation of the 2005 political drama of the same name, ends its limited run on June 8.

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