George Clooney Recalls On-Set Yelling Match That Almost Made Him Leave Hollywood

An argument with a producer almost cost George Clooney his acting career.

About a decade into his career — before landing his breakout role in ER — “I got in an argument with an executive producer,” the Jay Kelly actor, 64, told W Magazine in a story published on Tuesday, January 6.

“I was the third or fourth banana on a TV show, and I had to leave,” the Oscar winner continued. “I thought that was the end of my career. I wasn’t in a position of power, but I wasn’t going to be spoken to the way that I was. I told him to knock it off. He yelled at me. I yelled back.”

Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s,Clooney appeared on multi-episode arcs on shows including The Facts of Life, Roseanne, Sisters and Body of Evidence. While the actor didn’t elaborate on which project it was that he had his on-set tiff with a producer, a 2000 New York Times article revealed that he was fired from The Facts of Life in 1986 before being reluctantly rehired, and that he quit the 1991 sitcom Baby Talk after “a bitter fight with the executive producer.”

“It’s still debatable whether I was fired or I quit,” Clooney admitted to W. “But someone who I had helped out years earlier read that I’d been fired. He brought me in for an audition and gave me a pilot. That kept me in town.”