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George Clooney insists that Brad Pitt was devastated, shaken to the core, by the fact that People Magazine chose Jude Law and not Pitt as this year's Sexiest Man Alive. Now, finally, Pitt gets to counter that claim. "I think Matt was more shaken by it," argues Pitt, referring to his Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Twelve co-star Matt Damon. "I think he campaigned hard, put up a good fight and I think it was toughest on him. But I think if he keeps applying himself like he has been this year, I think we'll see some greatness from him. George and I started a class, a former Sexiest Men Alive class, and we're working with the young 'uns. Jude's at the top of his class immediately. It was obvious to us that he was a natural, so we had great hopes for that!" This kind of playful bickering has become the hallmark of the Ocean's films, which take charismatic A-list stars - Clooney, Pitt, Damon and Julia Roberts, as well as Bernie Mac, Andy Garcia and Don Cheadle - and let them run free, both on camera and behind-the-scenes. The first caper followed the hi-jinks as Danny Ocean (Clooney) and his team robbed Las Vegas casino boss Terry Benedict (Garcia) blind. Now, in Ocean's Twelve, once again directed by Steven Soderbergh, Benedict wants his money back in the worst way, forcing Ocean to reunite his team for a major heist in Europe. The newcomer this time around is Catherine Zeta Jones, who plays Isabel Lahiri, the gorgeous Interpol investigator out to get Ocean and, particularly, her former lover, Rusty (Pitt). "The relationship was pretty well fleshed out in the script," Pitt says of the Rusty-Isabel pairing. 'We were just excited to get Catherine first of all because she brings this great elegance to it. A lot of the film was going to be focused on her alone and she was going to have to carry that thing and would have to be someone who could carry that kind of weight. For us specifically, it was just pretty natural." Clooney is notorious for his practical jokes, but even though Clooney and Zeta Jones had worked together before, on the Coen brothers comedy Intolerable Cruelty, Pitt reports that Zeta-Jones got off easy on this one. "I think the biggest joke was on Catherine because she actually thought we were making a movie," he says. "Being the new kid, nobody told her, because she was up running lines and breaking down her character." If the new film is anywhere as successful as Ocean's Eleven, no one would be surprised to see a third Ocean's caper. After all, as Pitt notes, an Ocean's film is pretty much a gathering of friends hanging out in exotic locales. "I'd like to call it work, but it was pretty much automatic for us," says the actor, due next opposite Angelina Jolie in Mr and Mrs Smith. "First of all, there's a very low level of maturity amongst all the guys there, so that helps. We bonded very quickly. Then we got the beautiful women to make us look better, but it's pretty automatic." |
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