It was during the torture scene that George Clooney first noticed something was wrong. He was on location for Syriana, a political thriller about the CIA's war on terror, which was being filmed in Morocco last October. Clooney had put on a lot of weight, fast, for his role as CIA agent Robert Baer—from 172 up to 207 in under a month. After filming a scene in which Baer is captured by terrorists in Beirut and tortured—kicked to the floor with his arms tied to a desk—Clooney came up with a round-the-clock headache ("like an ice-cream brain freeze 24 hours a day," he says) and a strange clear fluid leaking out of his nose.
That night, with his scenes postponed, he flew to L.A., where he spent two weeks trying to figure out what he had done to himself—"X rays, M.R.I.'s, all that stuff," he says. "A lot of the doctors were like, 'You've got a headache. Go home.' I understand what they were thinking: Oh, he's an actor. He's being dramatic." Finally a neurologist -diagnosed a torn dura—the wrap around his spine. It was a big deal. His brain was literally sinking. What had been coming from his nose was displaced spinal fluid. After an operation in December, in which doctors shored up his spine with plastic bolts, Clooney was told that if he took it easy, he would be looking at a one-year recovery period; if he didn't, two.
"What you learn after you're 40 is, it's just about plugging up holes in the boat," says the 44-year-old actor. "You just hope you have enough corks to plug enough of the holes." Here's rehab George Clooney–style: Six days after his surgery, the tsunami hit Asia, and he says he "got kind of roped into the telethon [to raise relief funds]. I was running around in a neck brace yelling, 'Right. Three guys out there, two guys over there.' " After that, production started on his second outing as a director, Good Night, and Good Luck, which he also acted in, writing down his lines on scraps of paper to combat short-term memory loss from his injury. Then, when production ended in May, his Vegas golfing trip with his buddies resumed after a two-year hiatus, and he wasn't about to miss that. Oh, and then in July there was a quick trip to lobby the G-8 summit in Scotland, before returning in time to put the ink on a deal to build a new Vegas casino with Brad Pitt.
"The guy doesn't sleep," says Matt Damon, his Ocean's Eleven costar who teams up again with the actor in Syriana. "When I was staying at his house in Italy, I'd sneak along to the gym thinking I'm the only person around, and he'd be in there dripping sweat, having been in there for two hours. I was like: 'Oh, I see. All right. So it's not all that easy.' But he's fine for the whole effortless myth to remain. Of course he is, because it allows him to do exactly what he wants to do. When people look back, ten years after his career's over, they'll go, 'Look what that guy Clooney did, and we -didn't even realize it was happening.' "
