George Clooney knows what it’s like to be looking for your first big break. 

It may be difficult to remember, but there was a time when the star of Jay Kelly — as well as Ocean’s Eleven and Michael Clayton among so many others — was not a household name. “I’d been on hit shows, and I’d been on huge flops, but none of it worked,” he tells Krista Smith on a new episode of Skip Intro. “And then, right place, right time with ER, and suddenly everything changed. And I had a career.” 

It’s a journey Clooney shares with his character in Noah Baumbach’s new film Jay Kelly — a movie star looking back on the ups and downs of his life and the things he left behind to pursue a career in Hollywood. 

But Clooney and Kelly don’t share everything. “I don’t live and haven’t lived with regret, which this guy does,” Clooney says. “He goes through life just floating above everything. And everybody in his wake just gets damaged. … My concern and my conversations with Noah were to make sure that if the audience is going to take a ride on this, take a journey on this, you gotta still root for the guy who actually is causing all the problems.”

Clooney’s collaboration with Baumbach was a long time coming, dating back to the 2006 awards campaign. “He had The Squid and the Whale, and I had Good Night, and Good Luck,” Clooney recalls. “We were doing the circuit together. And I remember saying, you know, ‘Give an actor a gig.’ And he said, absolutely. That was 20 years ago. It took him a long time.”

Peter Mountain/Netflix

Now Baumbach and Clooney are a little older, but only one of them had to pay for it. “Noah famously does a lot of takes,” Clooney says. “Those running through the field scenes, I did [them] 20 or 30 times. And I was like, what are you not getting that you need? Because I’m running 300 yards, and I’m 64 years old.”

The film also represents Clooney’s first professional collaboration with Adam Sandler, who plays Ron, Jay’s put-upon manager. But the pair have been friends for years, since Clooney hosted Saturday Night Live in 1995. Jay Kelly is simply an opportunity to bring their dynamic to the screen. “We used to play basketball together,” Clooney says. “I know what he’s capable of as a dramatic actor, as well as a comedic actor. And this is when he gets to do both.”

Jay Kelly may be about Hollywood, but Clooney and Baumbach believe the story is universal (and we don’t mean the studio). “The themes in this movie have nothing to do with fame,” Clooney says. “They’re about every decision that every one of us has to make.”

Those decisions often come down to the personal relationships Clooney, Sandler, and the rest of the cast’s characters have in Jay Kelly. “You’re balancing work and family and time,” Clooney says. “We always look back as we get older and go, ‘I wish I’d spent more time with the family.’ You never go, ‘I wish I spent more time working’ — unless you have a really crappy family.”

Tune into the full Skip Intro interview to hear Clooney talk about his directing career, growing up in Kentucky, and his favorite Adam Sandler movies. You can watch the full interview with Clooney above, and stream Jay Kelly on Netflix right now.