'F***** it up': After Batman, George Clooney hasn't been allowed near a superhero movie

George Clooney has said that he "f***** it up" playing Batman.

The 60-year-old Hollywood star took on the role of the DC Comics character in the 1997 film Batman & Robin, and he laments how he flopped in the cape and cowl, a performance that has meant he has not been allowed near another superhero movie since.

He told People : "I did one superhero movie and I f***** it up so bad they won't let me near the set!"

Clooney starred alongside Uma Thurman as villain Poison Ivy, Arnold Schwarzenegger as villain Mr. Freeze, Chris O'Donnell as Batman's sidekick Robin and Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl, but the cartoonish blockbuster was universally panned by critics, with one review calling Clooney the "big zero" of the film.

Speaking about the parts that do work for him as an actor, he added: "My work, where my bread is buttered, is the kind of films that I grew up in the '60s and '70s, which is sort of the prime time for American filmmaking, which were all story-based."

It is not the first time Clooney has publicly spoken about his career low points.

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Earlier this month, he told Variety: "There are certain films I just go, 'I want my wife to have some respect for me. It's bad when your four-year-old kid goes, 'This sucks.' That could be painful."

Back in 2019, the Ocean's Eleven star told of how the Batman bomb actually helped him develop as an actor.

He told The Hollywood Reporter: "I wasn't good in it, it wasn't a good film," he said at the time, adding: "What I learned from that failure was that I had to relearn how I was working. Now, I wasn't just an actor getting a role, I was being held responsible for the film itself."

"So the next three films I did were Three Kings, Out of Sight and O Brother, Where Art Thou? That was a very specific choice for me to find better projects."