George Clooney Personally Invited Johnny Depp to Star in Ocean's Eleven, Was ‘Told to F*ck Right Off'

It’s not a rare occasion when actors that have already accepted an offer reach out to their colleagues in person. This is a common practice when you deal with A-listers like Johnny Depp: those people receive all too many sweet deals on a daily basis and are forced to reject most of them, so a personal touch is needed to tip the odds.

Still, this doesn’t always work, and actors don’t hold a grudge against each other for that.

Ocean’s Eleven is a cult classic now, there’s no room for debate here. But at the beginning of the century, when the movie was in the early works, multiple famous actors rejected the offer to join the cast.

Even though George Clooney himself tried to get many of them on board, he was “told to f*ck right off,” as the actor put it.

When Ocean’s Eleven was being put together, the director of the movie, Steven Soderbergh, wanted to have the greatest cast of all time. After he got George Clooney on board, it fell to the actor to convince his famous colleagues to join, and Clooney was trying his best, talking to Hollywood’s kings and queens.

Back then, everyone wanted to work with Soderbergh who just released two Oscar-nominated movies, and that was a handy card to play.

Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, and others were sure to hop on the fame train of Ocean’s Eleven relatively easily; to get Julia Roberts to join, Clooney and Soderbergh pranked her.

“We sent Julia a script and I wrote a note saying, ‘I hear you get 20 [million dollars] a picture now,’ and we sent her a $20 bill… It made her laugh, and yes, she jumped right on board,” recalls George Clooney.

Still, not everyone was this agreeable. Johnny Depp, for instance, was among those who straight-up refused without getting into details: he wanted to do another movie.

“Some very famous people told us to f**k right off… Johnny Depp. There were others. They regret it now. I regret doing f**king Batman, ” laughs Clooney.

Johnny Depp himself hasn’t expressed regrets about not joining Ocean’s Eleven’s cast — at least, not publicly. Depp got the role in the movie he wanted, a criminal drama Blow with Penélope Cruz. While the movie didn’t become quite as famous as Ocean’s Eleven, it brought Johnny more than enough critical appraisal.

Source: Variety