Clooney Defends Ruffalo’s Speech While Collecting Venice’s Lion

George Clooney defended Mark Ruffalo’s free speech in Venice on September 2, then took a Golden Lion for warning that fear shuts artists down. That morning he told reporters the antisemitism fight around Ruffalo was ridiculous. That night he said stories scare people who sell fear.

Paramount had called Ruffalo’s merger posts a bridge too far. Clooney answered as if a ban were on the table. Ruffalo still had his accounts, his co-stars, and a stack of famous names already on his side.

Clooney Calls the Charge Ridiculous, Then Collects a Lion

Clooney, 65, sat for a press conference on the Lido before the opening night of the 83rd Venice Film Festival. Elsa Keslassy asked him about Paramount’s attack on Ruffalo, who has campaigned against the studio’s $111 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. Clooney did not parse the Israel language. He reached for the Constitution.

I support Mark Ruffalo’s ability to speak freely. It’s ridiculous. We’re not going to ban speech. I believe in free speech even when I completely disagree with it. That’s important. In fact, it’s part of how democracy works.

George Clooney, Venice Film Festival press conference, September 2, 2026

He added that people in the room would disagree with most of what he stands for, and that this is how the argument is supposed to run. He said he likes Ruffalo. He called him a good man. He said he will always support that ability to speak.

On the deal itself he stayed cooler. He called the merger a complicated thing and said he does not see how it financially ends up making sense for the people trying to do it. He worries when a big company swallows another company, he said, because a lot of people are going to lose their jobs.

He used the same hour to needle the country as a kakistocracy, a government of the least qualified, and to say the richest people in the world owning the Washington Post and Twitter is a concern. He has already told a sitting president, in print, not to run again. He has spent years playing Edward R. Murrow, including a Broadway fight over media ethics. When he wants a microphone, he gets one.

What Mark Ruffalo Posted About Oracle and Gaza

Ruffalo was not answering a government gag. He was answering a studio. On August 21 he shared an Instagram clip of Safra Catz, Oracle’s executive vice chair and a Paramount board member, talking at a 2024 Israeli-American Council summit about “really profoundly scary” technology made available to the Israeli military after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks.

WHAT THE INSTAGRAM POST ACTUALLY SAID

• The money: Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder and David Ellison’s father, is the fortune funding his son’s Warner Bros. buy, Ruffalo wrote.
• The tech warning: Those tools, he said, will most likely be merged into one of the largest media companies in the world and one day used on you.
• The war language: He wrote that Catz revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.
• The jobs claim: He cited a Los Angeles study of 4,500 film and TV jobs over three years and added another 10,000 ancillary jobs, and he named 12 state attorneys general already in court.

A Paramount spokesperson told trade reporters the same day that the studio is troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute. Words like genocide and apartheid, applied to a corporate transaction, are not just wrong, the statement said, they cheapen the suffering those words are meant to describe. The studio asked for a lower temperature. A Catz spokesperson said the technology in the clip was meant for rescuing hostages taken on October 7.

Ruffalo answered on August 22. He called the antisemitism charge appalling and fundamentally dishonest, and he drew a line between criticizing a prime minister, a military contract, or the executives who supply it, and criticizing Jewish people.

https://x.com/MarkRuffalo/status/2091236072311165311

He also said the $111 billion deal would hand one family control over CNN, HBO and Warner Bros., backed in part by foreign money whose influence on editorial decisions has never been fully explained. That is a merger argument. It is also the paragraph Paramount treated as a prejudice problem.

The $111 Billion Deal Is Frozen by 12 States

Clooney’s free-speech line landed on a deal that federal antitrust lawyers have already cleared and that states have not. The Justice Department signed off on June 12. California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 other Democratic attorneys general sued on July 13. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order on July 20 and pointed the fight toward a trial in March 2027. Paramount has said that without the suits, and a separate Writers Guild case, it could have closed in weeks.

WHERE THE BUYOUT STOOD WHEN CLOONEY SPOKE

David Ellison, Paramount Skydance’s chief executive, has told staff he remains highly confident. Clooney would not endorse the math. He also would not repeat Ruffalo’s Gaza charges. The jobs worry was the piece he was willing to carry into a room full of cameras.

Jewish Signatories Draw a Line, and So Do His Critics

By the time Clooney spoke, Ruffalo already had a choir. On September 1, more than 170 Jewish artists, writers, faith leaders and scholars published an open letter from Jewish artists titled Enough. The names included Hannah Einbinder, Joel Coen, Todd Haynes, Tony Kushner, Ilana Glazer, Wallace Shawn, Joaquin Phoenix and Naomi Klein.

Enough with the false and dangerous weaponization of charges of antisemitism against those who are brave enough to point out the obvious: that the assault on the Palestinian people and the assault on our liberties at home are deeply interconnected, and there is nothing antisemitic about recognizing that fact.

Enough, open letter in defense of Mark Ruffalo, September 1, 2026

The letter said the merger would destroy thousands of livelihoods, tighten control of the press (it pointed at CBS News), and sit inside a larger tech project the Ellisons have linked to Israel. It cited Larry Ellison’s purported $350 million in funding and pledges to the Tony Blair Institute. It quoted a Washington Post poll, as the signers read it, that 61 percent of American Jews say Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza and that four in ten call those crimes genocide. Filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan, a friend of 30 years, had already called the antisemitism charge a cynical and disgusting lie.

WHERE THE TOWN SPLITS ON THE WORDS

• Paramount and allied groups: The Simon Wiesenthal Center and Creative Community for Peace backed the studio’s reading that Ruffalo pulled in tropes to fight a business deal.
• Rabbi Noah Farkas: The Jewish Federation Los Angeles president said the rant combined Jewish wealth, media control, secret technology and sinister global power, a recognizable old pattern.
• The Enough signers: They call that reading a smear and say pointing at Gaza and Hollywood together is, for them, a Jewish ethical duty.

Clooney stepped into that split and declined to pick a side on the sentences. He picked a side on the speaker. That is a narrower gift than the Lion speech made it sound.

The Lifetime Speech Names Fear, Not the Town

Hours later Laura Dern handed him the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, the honor the Biennale board had voted him on artistic director Alberto Barbera’s recommendation. Dern praised stories that look at protecting freedoms. Clooney joked that a lifetime award makes you wonder if they know something you do not, then he went somewhere darker.

The first people that authoritarians try to shut down are not politicians. They’re journalists who ask questions, they’re the artists who refuse simple answers, the filmmakers, writers, actors and musicians who insist that someone you never met is deserving of your empathy. Stories are always dangerous to people who peddle in fear. The people who are afraid of books and music and stories are never the heroes in history.

George Clooney, Golden Lion acceptance, Venice, September 2, 2026

He said movies do not stop wars, lower inflation, or fix elections. They remind us a stranger might be the hero in somebody else’s story. If we can still sit together in the dark and care about people we have never met, he said, we will be OK. He thanked his wife, Amal Clooney, and their twins, and he kidded that the kids are the only two people who thought he was good in Batman.

The speech was aimed at people in charge and people with the most money telling us to fear one another. In the morning those people were merger barons. In the night they were authoritarians. Missing from both versions was the local habit his own industry already knows: a posting, a statement, a dropped option, a career that does not recover.

Gina Carano Lost Work Without a Peer Shield

Clooney has used the First Amendment before when the threat came from outside the lot. In December 2014, after the Sony hack around The Interview, he argued that the amendment usually protects some guy burning a flag, and that forcing a studio to pull a film is a different and dangerous game. Foreign pressure was the villain then. Hollywood’s own human-resources machine was not.

SPEECH PUNISHMENTS CLOONEY DID NOT ANSWER

1. May 29, 2018: ABC cancels Roseanne Barr’s revived sitcom within hours of a racially charged tweet about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett.
2. February 2021: Lucasfilm says Gina Carano is not employed there and will not be, after an Instagram post that used Holocaust imagery to warn about political hatred.
3. August 31, 2026: Patricia Heaton tells interviewer Andrew Gold she belonged to a private Hollywood network that used code words so conservatives could keep working.
4. September 2, 2026: Clooney, collecting world cinema’s gold lion, says he will always support Ruffalo’s ability to speak freely.

Carano later settled with Disney and said she would pay that price again. Barr’s show was gone before the next news cycle. Heaton’s point was that the hiding was real during the Obama years and after. Clooney has not put those names in a sentence with free speech. He put Ruffalo’s name there, on the day the town was already lining up behind Ruffalo.

Nobody Put a Ban on the Table

The loudest objection after the presser was not that Ruffalo should be jailed. It was that Clooney smuggled a content fight into a censorship story. John Ondrasik, the Five for Fighting singer who has already gone after industry silence around Israel supporters, put it in one line: nobody is questioning the right to speak, the fight is the charge that Ruffalo is a raging antisemite, and Clooney had no comment on that. Other voices made the hiring point. A studio does not owe a critic a job. Paramount issued a statement. It did not pull a Marvel contract in the room.

Ruffalo can say what he said. Clooney can dislike it and still want him heard. Both of those can be true, and they still leave the morning’s trick in place. He treated a press statement as if it were a law. He treated a peer with a global fan base as if he were the first artist authoritarians come for. Then he walked into a palazzo, took a lion, and warned the world about people who peddle in fear.

He is scheduled to give a masterclass at the festival on September 3. The merger remains in court, with a trial aimed at March 2027, which is a longer calendar than a standing ovation.