Brad Pitt Tricked Italy into Thinking George Clooney Is a Huge Diva During ‘Ocean’s Twelve’ Shoot

George Clooney became fast friends with his “Ocean’s Eleven” co-stars Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and Don Cheadle during the making of Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 crime caper, so it’s not surprising to hear how ridiculous the off-set shenanigans got when the group reunited for the 2004 sequel “Ocean’s Twelve.” During a career retrospective video interview with GQ magazine (watch the full interview below), Clooney revealed that Pitt pulled one hell of a prank on him when the “Ocean’s Twelve” shoot moved to Italy.

“We went to Europe to do ‘Ocean’s Twelve’ and shot some of it in Lake Como, which is my hometown,” Clooney said. “Brad sent out a memo to all of the people in the town, my town where I lived there for years. He posted on telephone polls that the movie is coming to town and to only address me as Mr. Clooney, or in my character name as Danny Ocean, and to not look me right in the eye. So all the newspapers were like, ‘Il Divo! George Clooney is Il Divo!’ It was horrible. It was a horrible story that I later got him back for.”

Flash forward to one night after filming had wrapped and Clooney, Pitt, Damon, and Cheadle took a pontoon boat across Lake Como to an abandoned mansion. “The first thing we saw was, like, a statue of a snake eating a woman’s head or something,” Clooney said. “We came down to the conclusion that we’d give $10,000 to any guy that could spend the night in the haunted house with just a candle, six matches, and a bottle of wine. Pitt took the bet…but only lasted a few hours. There was a lot of idiocy that went on along the way, but we had a wonderful time.”

The group would get together again for a second sequel, 2007’s “Ocean’s Thirteen,” but Clooney wouldn’t divulge some of the crazy things that happened while cameras weren’t rolling. All three films in Clooney and Pitt’s “Ocean’s” trilogy earned over $300 million worldwide, with the 2001 original’s gross tapping out with a franchise-high of $450 million worldwide.

Watch Clooney weigh in on all of his major roles in the GQ video interview below.

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