Daily Times

Actor and filmmaker George Clooney is hoping the media will be gentler to Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle, after she gave birth to a baby boy.

“I think people should be a little kinder. She is a young woman who just had a baby, you know?” George Clooney said on Tuesday.

Clooney is a good friend of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. He and his lawyer wife Amal Alamuddin attended the royal wedding last year and Amal Alamuddin was one of the guests at Markle’s baby shower. Clooney has been outspoken in his defence of Markle, a former actress and American, who has been the subject of harsh gossip in some publications. At the premiere of his new Hulu series ‘Catch-22’, Clooney said the media scrutiny will likely intensify now that the baby, who was named Archie, has arrived. He conceded that some of that comes with the royal territory.

“If you’re a royal, that’s what you have to do,” he said. “It’s the other versions of it: Going to interview people’s parents, that kind of stuff. It starts to step into a really dark place.”

At the premiere of his new Hulu series ‘Catch-22’, Clooney said media scrutiny will likely intensify now that the baby, who was named Archie, has arrived. He conceded that some of that comes with the royal territory

Besides celebrating upcoming May 17, 2019 debut of ‘Catch-22’, Clooney was also in a joyous mood because of the release of two journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who had been imprisoned in Myanmar. They were released on Tuesday after more than a year behind bars. They won the Pulitzer Prize last month for international reporting, along with the AP.

Clooney thinks media should be more careful in their coverage of Markle, while also praising his wife Alamuddin’s role in freeing two detained journalists from a Myanmar prison.

“My wife spent the last year, every day, with Gail Gove and with Stephen Adler, working, as hard as you could work, behind the scenes, to get these guys out,” he said.

“And last night, for my birthday, at my birthday dinner, those two men walked out,” Clooney continued. “And I have to tell you, I couldn’t be more proud of my wife. I couldn’t be more proud of Reuters and the way they stuck up for journalism.”

He added, “It’s a dangerous time to be a journalist. So, to win one, I’m very proud of my wife. And congratulations to everyone – and the AP.”