Something’s gone wrong. Far away, Earth is silent. Toxic clouds swirl around it in serpentine coils. Nothing seems to be alive below them.

In The Midnight Sky, directed by and starring George Clooney, the crew of the NASA starship Aether is returning home after exploring a newly discovered moon of Jupiter, which turns out to have a breathable atmosphere and a habitable climate. But as they emerge from a communications blackout they find that the discovery of a potential new home for human beings has been overshadowed by the death of the old one. 

When shooting on the film wrapped in February, the real world was a different place. “There wasn’t the pandemic, and we hadn’t set the whole West Coast on fire,” Clooney told Vanity Fair for this first look at the project, which Netflix will debut in December. “I mean, the picture we show of Earth [in the movie] doesn’t look that much different than the satellite pictures of the West Coast right now.”

“It’s science fiction,” he added, "which unfortunately is less fictional as we move through the days.”

In the film, which is based on the novel Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton, the cascade of cataclysms that consume Earth in 2049 are unspecified, but Clooney imagines they aren’t very different from the traumas that have defined 2020: widespread illness, environmental collapse, political strife. “The sickness of hate and the elements that come from that, battles and wars—that has been percolating for quite some time,” he said. “There’s the sadness [in the film] of what man is capable of doing to man and how easily it can just be taken away.”

There is a chance of salvation, even in the more dire world of The Midnight Sky. “I wanted it to be about redemption in a way,” Clooney said. “I wanted there to be some hopefulness in a fairly bleak story about the end of mankind.”

Clooney plays Augustine Lofthouse, a scientist at a remote arctic research station who may be the last man on Earth. The astronomer is dying from cancer, and he chooses to remain at the snowbound observatory to end his days alone, the same way he lived them.

Except he’s not actually alone. A child named Iris (Caoilinn Springall) hid herself away during the outpost’s evacuation and now depends on him for survival. “He wasn’t really into protecting himself at all,” Clooney said. “The little girl is a problem for him, because now he actually has to take care of someone.”

Augustine also begins to feel an overwhelming obligation to venture out of their safe haven to contact the Aether’s crew and send them a warning message: Turn back.

Clooney Ages Up

Clooney had a supporting role in last year’s Catch-22 series, but he hasn’t starred in a film since 2016. His character’s withered, aged appearance here might catch audiences off guard. “I don’t look so good,” he said. “I’m not even 60 yet, but the character is 70. Unfortunately, I’m looking closer to that. I’ve always looked a little older, but now I really look like I am. I’d say I look like my father, but my father looks better than me.” 

He’s best known for handsome carefree characters in films like Ocean’s Eleven and Up in the Air, but Augustine carries a heavyheartedness more akin to Clooney’s work in The American or Syriana, the latter of which won him a supporting-actor Oscar in 2006. “There was a stillness to the character that I really liked,” he said. “You need to be of a certain age for it to actually hurt. When you’re younger, we don’t feel like we’ve had enough life experiences for things like this to actually hurt you in your chest. And so, it felt like I was the right age, and it was a good time for me to move into this kind of role.”

He modeled the character’s look on the mountain-man beards many arctic researchers grow (“It’s just so fucking cold,” he said) and even gave himself a customized haircut: “I just took a shaver and shaved all my hair off, and I tried to do it kind of badly so that it looked patchy. And I’ve got some pretty funky scars on my head in general. Since he is clearly dying of something that he has to have a transfusion for, which is usually some form of cancer, it was important to me to add some elements so that I didn’t look like I look normally.” 

“I have had a lot of people, the first couple of shots in the movie, not realize it’s me,” Clooney added with a laugh. “They’re like, ‘That’s you?’ My wife was very happy when I finished shooting this.”

To save the crew of the Aether, Augustine and the foundling girl have to venture through the increasingly toxic air and melting arctic landscape to reach a different observatory that has a communications array powerful enough to reach the starship.

Unfortunately, the hope the ship represents for humanity is meager anyway: it carries only five passengers.

Mission specialist Sully (Felicity Jones) is desperate to reestablish communications with the unresponsive Earth, while David Oyelowo’s flight commander Adewole considers steering them into uncharted space as a shortcut home. Flight engineer Maya (Tiffany Boone) must keep the ship functioning as it crashes through clouds of rocky ice. Kyle Chandler’s pilot Mitchell and Demián Bichir’s aerodynamicist Sanchez fret over whether returning at all is the right course.

“The characters in the book are different,” Clooney said. “Kyle Chandler’s character is sort of a young Russian guy, and I really wanted Kyle and Demián’s characters to be older. I wanted them to be the old men in The Muppets in the balcony. I wanted them to have a little fun every once in a while. To be experienced, but not be panicked.”

The Midnight Sky intertwines two very different plots: the NASA crew on a collision course with Earth and the frail scientist and child battling brutal arctic elements. “It’s a tricky thing,” Clooney said of the movie, “because half of it’s Gravity, and the other half of it’s The Revenant. And they’re not natural fits, so it was a constant balancing act.”

Clooney’s experience as a stranded astronaut in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2015 film helped him conceive some of the space sequences in this one. “One of the things that I learned from working with Alfonso about space is, once you’re in the antigravity kind of world, there is no north and south or east or west, because it doesn’t exist in space. Up isn’t up, and down isn’t down,” he said. “So the camera can be upside down, characters can be upside down, and it’s hard to do, because you’re constantly rotating the camera, and hoping you’re not doing it so much you make everybody sick. Alfonso did it just beautifully.”

Life Finds a Way

The movie’s screenplay is by Mark L. Smith, who cowrote The Revenant, but Clooney proposed one major change to the story involving Jones’s character—although it was necessitated by circumstances outside his control. 

“We started shooting my stuff first, because we were in Iceland,” he said. “About two weeks into shooting, I get a call from Felicity, and she goes, ‘I’m pregnant.’ And I’m like, ‘Great! Congratulations!… Oh, shit.’ So then it was like, ‘Well, what do we do?’”

The first plan was to shoot alternate takes of each scene with a body double, then digitally swap Jones’s head onto the body of the stand-in. That proved costly on a film already heavy on visual effects, but it was doable.

“We did that for about a week, and then she felt she was trying so hard not to look like she was putting on baby weight and stuff. And I finally just said, ‘You know what? You’re pregnant. People have sex, and you got pregnant. And we’re going to just build it into it,’” Clooney said.

Making Jones’s astronaut pregnant on the tail end of a two-year space journey added some tension to the crew of the Aether. Oyelowo’s character is the father.

“They’re still very professional,” said Clooney. “He’s still the captain of the ship, and they still sleep in their own quarters, and they still function as grown adults. But when they get back home, they’ve got some stuff to deal with.”

The addition brought some thematic symmetry to the parallel storylines. The dying old man on Earth and the last vestiges of human life hurtling through space each now have a child to consider.

They each safeguard a piece of the future, which will determine whether there is a future or not.

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