Don’t expect George and Amal Clooney to expand their brood anytime soon.
“I’m 39,” Amal told The Hollywood Reporter with a firm shake of her head when asked if she wanted more kids with her Oscar-winning husband. “I already had them quite late.”
Despite rumors that George, 56, and Amal used fertility treatments to conceive their twins, Ella and Alexander, the “Suburbicon” director insists that Amal’s pregnancy was a surprise to them both — and that her pregnancy with twins was an outright shock at Amal’s ultrasound.
“[Her doctor] goes, ‘Well, there’s one.’ And I said, ‘Great.’ And then he goes, ‘And there’s the second one,'” George recalled of learning the news. “And I was like, ‘What?’ We just sat there, staring at that piece of paper they give you, and I kept thinking there was a mistake.”
When the twins were born in June (a month early, George noted), he could barely believe what a tremendous change being a father has been.
“It was wild,” he said. “You know, everything is conceptual until it’s real. It’s like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to be parents, yeah.’ And all of a sudden you go: ‘Holy s—t. I’m a parent!’ … The first thing you think is, ‘I hope I don’t screw this up,'” he continued. “I mean, look, we are all responsible for things in life, and Amal and I are responsible for each other in a way — we look out for one another and we care about one another. But you are really responsible for two kids. I want them to be happy. I want them to have a sense of humor. I want them to be interested in things. I want them to be compassionate about other people’s plights. Because that’s the thing, you know? You have to have some sort of empathy.”
“It had never been part of my DNA,” the self-described “really good diaper guy” added of parenthood. “We didn’t plan on it. We never talked about it until after we were married, which is funny. There was an assumption that we didn’t want them. And then, after the wedding, Amal and I were talking and we just felt we’d gotten very lucky, both of us, and we should share whatever good luck we’ve got. It would seem self-centered to just have that belong to us.”
The former “E.R.” star doesn’t miss his days as Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor, though he admits that he and his wife don’t sleep much anymore.
“That seems like a lifetime ago,” he said. “Now my house is filled with the warm sounds of babies crying. You should see when my friends show up and see me change a diaper, the laughter that comes from them. I go, ‘I know, I know.’ I’ve given them so much s—t for so many years, I deserve every bit of it.”
Not all aspects of the Clooneys’ lives are sunshine, rainbows and Huggies, however. In July, George filed a lawsuit against paparazzi from Voici magazine for photographing his infant twins, alleging that the photographers scaled a tree to photograph the family inside their Lake Como home.
“Every single day there’s some crazy sort of infringement,” George fumed. “And you go, ‘OK, we’ll eat it. That’s what we have to do.’ But when someone breaks the law, that’s beyond what we bargained for, beyond the pact I made: that when you’re famous, you’re going to be followed. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t be furious.”
“You see a red light outside your bedroom window at night and you look outside and realize a camera is looking inside your bedroom. We caught the guy. We literally took a picture of the guy and he put his hands up and said, ‘You can’t take a picture of me.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be f—king kidding,'” he added.
Still, part of his beef with the paparazzi comes from his new Papa Bear nature. Amal told the magazine the most pleasant surprise about the actor throughout their four years and counting together has been “what a great father he is.”
That came as a surprise to George, too, who still can’t seem to wrap his head around his new domestically blissful life. “She said that?” he asked. “Really?”