North Korea’s tubby tyrant can’t tell me what to watch, says an outraged George Clooney.
“We cannot be told we can’t see something by Kim Jong-un, of all f–king people,” the actor railed in a new interview.
“Here, we’re talking about an actual country deciding what content we’re going to have,” Clooney raged to Deadline Hollywood.
“This affects not just movies,” he said, weighing in on the North Korean cyber-terror campaign that this week successfully shut down Sony’s planned Christmas release of the screwball satire “The Interview.”
“This affects every part of business that we have. That’s the truth. What happens if a newsroom decides to go with a story, and a country or an individual or corporation decides they don’t like it,” he said. “Forget the hacking part of it. You have someone threaten to blow up buildings,” he said, “And all of a sudden everybody has to bow down.”
Sony can’t be accused of cowardice for pulling the plug on the Seth Rogen and James Franco flick, Clooney insisted.
“Sony didn’t pull the movie because they were scared; they pulled the movie because all the theaters said the were not going to run it. And they were not going to run it because they talked to their lawyers and those lawyers said if somebody dies in one of these, then you’re going to be responsible.”
Clooney said of the movie, “This is a silly comedy. But the truth is, what it now says about us is a whole lot. We have a responsibility to stand up against this.
“That’s not just Sony, but all of us, including my good friends in the press who have the responsibility to be asking themselves: What was important? What was the important story to be covering here,” he said, blasting the media for lasciviously enjoying the leaks while ignoring Sony’s status as a victim.
“They were just enjoying all the salacious s–t instead of saying, ‘Wait a minute, is this really North Korea? And if it is, are we really going to bow to that?’ ” he said.
“The hacking is terrible because of the damage they did to all those people,” he said of Sony employees. “Their medical records . . . Social Security numbers.”
He added, “Somehow we have allowed North Korea to dictate content, and that is just insane.”
