George Clooney’s 58th birthday was one to remember, thanks to his wife Amal Clooney’s good deeds.
“It was pretty great,” the two-time Oscar winner told Us Weekly exclusively during Hulu’s Catch-22 premiere at the TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood on Tuesday, May 7. “We celebrated my wife, who has been working to get the Reuters journalists freed in Myanmar for a year, and they walked out last night, and that’s a good birthday.”
Journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested in December 2017 while working on a story about the Myanmar military’s abuse of Rohingya Muslims. They had been accused of violating the Official Secrets Act by illegally possessing secret state documents, but insisted they were framed. Lone, 32, and Oo, 28, were convicted in September 2018 and sentenced to seven years in prison. Human rights lawyer Amal, 41, served as counsel to the journalists, who were released from prison early Tuesday morning.
“It is inspiring to see a news organization so committed to the protection of innocent men and the profession of journalism,” Amal (née Alamuddin) said in a statement to NPR. “It has been an honor to represent Reuters and the two journalists in this case, and I hope that their release signals a renewed commitment to press freedom in Myanmar.”
The Clooneys have been married since September 2014 and share twins Ella and Alexander, 23 months.
Of course, George is not the only person who is inspired by his wife’s work. “I was completely intimidated [when I met her],” the actor’s Catch-22 costar Graham Patrick Martin admitted to Us at Tuesday’s premiere.
“[She was] lovely, lovely. And he’s a lovely guy,” Martin, 27, added. “It was cool to strip down that sort of point of view we have of celebrities and see why they become that, and that’s through hard work. This doesn’t happen by accident. There’s a lot of super handsome people in the world — not everyone has [George’s] career. The reason he has his career is because he is so tremendously talented.”
George and Martin’s costar Julie Ann Emery echoed to Us, “[Amal] is brilliant. She’s so clever, and what she does so matters in the world, and we’re just a bunch of stupid actors. I admire her so much. … She’s actually changing the world — and looking gorgeous while she does it.”
Catch-22 premieres on Hulu Friday, May 17.
With reporting by Antonia Blyth
