Summary
- George Clooney’s Oscar win for
Syriana
sparked debate on award categorization due to his limited screen time vs. top billing. - Clooney suffered a serious head injury during a brutal torture scene filming for
Syriana
, leading to a life-changing spinal injury. - Despite ongoing chronic pain from his spinal injury, Clooney’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar win remains a bittersweet career highlight.
George Clooney has had some perilously close calls throughout his lifetime, including two dangerous motorcycle accidents about a decade apart while still in the prime of his career. His closest brush with death, though, came as the result of an acting role as CIA officer Bob Barnes in the film Syriana. A critically lauded movie, Syriana peered into global politics as only writer-director Stephen Gaghan could and secured Clooney the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Clooney’s 2006 Oscar win for Syriana was the subject of some debate about how the awards are categorized. Though Clooney received top billing and his face on the film’s poster, he won as a ‘supporting actor.’ One could easily argue that this is a leading role, but Clooney only spends about 20% of the film on-screen, and marketing aside, Jeffrey Wright and Matt Damon could also be considered leads.
Syriana
- Release Date
- November 23, 2005
- Runtime
- 123
Clooney Suffered a Serious Accident During Torture Scene
Regardless of the semantic awards arguments, what was irrefutable was Clooney’s commitment to the role. Clooney carried some extra weight and a bearded, disheveled look to play Bob Barnes. In heightening the realism and drama of Gaghan’s macro-scoped film, he was tasked to act in a brutal torture scene. Tied to a chair during filming, Clooney was unable to shield his head when the chair he was bound to tipped over. Unaware that the floor impact had torn his dura (the membrane holding spinal fluid at the base of his brain), Clooney instead thought he may have suffered a stroke.
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Clooney described the dramatic event in a 2012 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, saying, “I knew immediately [how serious it was]… It was like a train horn going off in your head, and you can’t see, and you can’t stand.” Clooney chartered a plane from Morocco back to Los Angeles and checked into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Diagnosing Clooney was initially difficult, even though spinal fluid was leaking from the actor’s nose.
George Clooney’s Medical Journey
On the advice of actor Lisa Kudrow, Clooney visited her neurologist brother, finding out about the dural damage around his spine. This led to a battery of medical procedures, including painful spinal injections and blood patches to encourage faster healing where the dura tears had occurred. Eventually, Clooney endured a 9-hour surgery on Christmas Eve, 2005, only a month after Syriana had been released to critical praise for both Clooney and writer-director Gaghan.
The benefit of hindsight and the knowledge of Clooney’s life-altering injury while shooting Syriana make watching the film nowadays significantly more dramatic. In the infamous torture scene, when his character’s fingernails are torn out with pliers, and he’s pummeled to the ground, one can’t help but think of how the head injury may have occurred.
Clooney Absolved Mark Strong of Wrongdoing
Mark Strong played Clooney’s terrorist captor, and both have their acting dialed up to 11 in the scene. In one shot, the chair Clooney is tied to is seen teetering on two legs. Was this the moment he suffered the fall? Possibly – and for a long time, Mark Strong anguished over his responsibility for the injury. Years later, however, Strong recounted that Clooney had “absolved” him of the accident.
For a jet-setting film star with plenty of public interest in his personal life and romances, Clooney has always been a very private person. Despite a successful surgery to alleviate his worst symptoms, he has continued to experience chronic pain over the years, something he revealed in interviews only years after Syriana.
Clooney’s Ongoing Battle With Spinal Injury and an Oscar Win
The pain was so severe that Clooney has said he contemplated suicide. “I thought I was going to die. Talk to any doctor about a CSF – a cerebral/spinal fluid leak – and they’ll tell you it’s way up there on the pain scale. There was this whole coming to terms with [mortality].” Add to that the depressive effects of the morphine and Vicodin diet he was put on, and it’s easy to understand how Clooney had difficulty thinking he could soldier on through life – particularly as a public figure.
Three months after the surgery, Clooney’s pain had diminished somewhat significantly, but he was coming to grips with his spinal injury being a life-long affliction. On March 5, 2006, Clooney appeared at the Oscars, having shed the weight and beard of his Syriana character. When Nicole Kidman announced Clooney as the winner of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, Clooney first hugged his Syriana co-star, William Hurt, then gave a short speech, poking fun at his role as Batman and his Sexiest Man Alive award – with a noticeably muted disposition.
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By some metrics, Clooney’s only Oscar win as an actor may be a career-crowning achievement. Still, it’s hard to think he wouldn’t have traded the golden statuette for the life he had before his spinal injury. Several publications criticized Clooney’s smugness in the speech, as well as a cutting South Park episode. What these criticisms missed was how Clooney’s new life of chronic pain had re-framed his outlook on his own celebrity – making his Oscar speech all the more sincere. Rent Syriana on Prime Video.
