“I used to have my work life and my personal life, and they could look quite different,” Amal Clooney told an audience in Bangkok on June 9. Then she married George Clooney in 2014. “That changed quite a lot.”
Clooney, 48, was an established international human rights lawyer before she met the actor, 65. She was speaking at a Cartier Dialogues event. In the early days of the marriage, she said, she felt boxed in by how people would read her choices. “I felt like, well, I can’t be seen wearing this dress or doing this because I’m in front of a judge on Monday.”
That worry did not last. “It just doesn’t matter as much as living your life,” she said, “and ultimately if you’re good at what you do, that is going to shine through or not.” She would not let it stop her doing what mattered to her family or her relationship.
The adjustment was not painless. “It was easier when I could decide what kind of exposure I got,” she said. “It was something new to navigate.”
Work, twins and risk
The couple co-founded the Clooney Foundation for Justice in 2016. It supports legal aid for women and girls, and Clooney pointed to Malawi, where she said one in 10 girls under 15 is forced into marriage and the country has only about 800 lawyers in total.
Their fraternal twins, Alexander and Ella, were born in 2017. George Clooney told People in October 2025 that the births changed where the two were willing to go. “You can’t just go swinging as you used to,” he said. He recalled enjoying trips to the Nuba Mountains, Darfur and Abyei, all war zones, and said his wife spent two years in a bunker in Beirut working on court cases. “We had to make decisions not to do that once we had kids.”
The family now lives on a farm in France. The two still go out for a proper date night, most recently at the King’s Trust 50th Anniversary Celebration in London in May.
