Is George Clooney a good dad? Inside the relationship with his kids

George and Amal Clooney’s kids are now three years old. So, how’s dad handling fatherhood? Obviously, little Ella & Alexander Clooney’s parents are fiercely protective of them and tend to safeguard the children’s privacy. However, from time to time, George & Amal have let a few tidbits about their twins slip.

Scary smart

During an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2019, Clooney confessed that the twins’ intelligence intimidates him. “Here’s the scary part, because they obviously got my wife’s brains,” he told DeGeneres. “They’re not quite two, and they can count from one to twenty in English & Italian.” Joking, he added, “I’m still trying to do the English part.”

“The other day I caught my son — because my wife is very, very English, very British — my son said ‘zebra,’” he recounted, while pronouncing the word with a short “e.” “I’m gonna fix that though. That’s not gonna happen,” he said.

George Clooney has been very vocal about how he appreciates his wife, Amal Alamuddin’s smart mind. Amal is a human rights defense lawyer. It appears the twins take after mom in the brains department. And if the kids have inherited Amal’s brain, Alexander & Ella have also inherited their dad’s sense of humor. The Batman star confessed that they already pulled pranks at home, and he was the victim.

Puissant pranksters

Being a prankster probably isn’t hereditary. However, the Clooney twins make a compelling case that it’s possible. “They do pranks already,” Clooney, a notorious prankster himself, told Today’s Savannah Guthrie. “[They] put peanut butter on their shoes so it looks like poo poo on their shoes & stuff, and they think that’s funny.” It is.

Although his kids made fun of him, the celebrity dad was never mad. George Clooney said in a previous interview that life was too great for him to feel bad. “I’m not mad at anything,” he told Entertainment Tonight at the premiere of his dramedy Catch-22. “I got a brilliant, beautiful wife, I got two knuckleheads for kids, life’s great.”

Personality plus

“They have their own personalities. He goes outside and hugs my car. ‘Car!’” George told DeGeneres, pantomiming Alexander hugging a vehicle. “And then my daughter’s up in my wife’s closet with purses going, ‘Mine!’ So I see this is going to be a fun, fun life for me.”

The Clooneys’ former nanny, Connie Simpson, insisted the children get their personalities from their parents. “It was really funny because the little girl was such the essence of her mother and the little boy is the essence of his dad,” she told People in 2018.

“It just kind of grew . . . you could see it manifesting every day that you were with them,” Simpson recalled. “The look that George has in his movies, his son was showing that too and I just thought that was the cutest thing.”

Forward-looking father

In a previous interview with The Hollywood Reporter George revealed everything that he plans to teach his kids about growing up. “I want them to be happy. I want them to have a sense of humor. I want them to be interested in things,” he said. “I want them to be compassionate about other people’s plights. Because that’s the thing, you know? You have to have some sort of empathy.”

On the red carpet prior to accepting his AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, Clooney shared that there isn’t an award in the world that can compete with being Ella & Alexander’s dad.

When asked about his greatest achievement, Clooney said, “Well, it’s not really my achievement; it’s much more our achievement and our luck. It’s these two knuckleheads we have at home right now, because it is pretty magical and pretty fun. This is all really exciting, but it’s really fun being home.”

Good home training

George Clooney didn’t become a “great” father to his twin kids, Ella & Alexander Clooney, all on his own. Thanks to his dad, Nick Clooney, he learned how to be an exceptional father and an even better husband for his family.

“He is a great dad, a great, great dad as his dad was to him. Just like a father should be,” George’s friend Richard Kind gushed in an interview with Us Weekly. “I knew he’d be a good father because everything he does is good.”