#George Clooney says it ‘hurts’ to watch Batman & Robin

Where “Batman & Robin” was once widely considered to be the worst superhero movie of all time, the recent boom of comics-inspired films has produced a number of titles — “Green Lantern,” “Suicide Squad” and Ben Affleck’s “Daredevil,” to name a few — that would handily surpass Joel Schumacher’s 1997 campy classic.

But for George Clooney, his turn as the Caped Crusader remains for him one of the great insults to the dramatic arts, according to a new interview with the legendary actor on “The Howard Stern Show,” first reported by The Hollywood Reporter.

He told the shock jockey this week that it “physically hurts” to watch his “terrible” performance in “Batman & Robin,” which also stars Uma Thurman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Alicia Silverstone and Chris O’Donnell.

“The truth of the matter is, I was bad in it. Akiva Goldsman — who’s won the Oscar for writing since then — he wrote the screenplay, and it’s a terrible screenplay, he’ll tell you. I’m terrible in it, I’ll tell you. Joel Schumacher, who just passed away, directed it, and he’d say, ‘Yeah, it didn’t work.’ We all whiffed on that one,” said Mr. Amal Alamuddin.

“It’s a big, monster machine,” Clooney told Stern, suggesting he couldn’t help the part he played in the cluster-flick. “I just sort of jumped in and did what they said.”

The actor-director, who performs both roles in his new Netflix release “The Midnight Sky” with Felicity Jones, said he was “just an actor getting an acting job” — one that came with a paycheck of $1 million, which he compared to his co-star Schwarzenegger’s $25 million payday to play Mr. Freeze. “I couldn’t have done that one differently,” he said.