George Clooney cut Josh Brolin from his movie Suburbicon with 'awful note'

George Clooney found himself in the supremely awkward position of having to cut one of his friends from his forthcoming movie ‘Suburbicon’.

Josh Brolin had a role in the movie, which has been written by the Coen Brothers, but he’s now on the cutting room floor.

And Clooney added that he had to inform him of the decision through an ‘awful note’.

“We shot a couple of scenes with Josh [playing] a baseball coach that are really really funny,” Clooney told Entertainment Weekly.

“But after we did our first screening, the one thing that became really clear to me was that [the scenes] let the air out of the balloon, in terms of the tension in the film.

“I had to write him this awful note where I just said, ‘You’re not going to believe it. but these scenes really don’t work any more.’ He felt bad, and he thought maybe something went wrong, and I said, ‘I’m sending you the scenes, so you can see, they’re actually the two funniest scenes in the movie’.

Brolin and Clooney both starred in the Coen brothers’ last movie – ‘Hail, Caesar!’ – making things extra awkward.

“I remember sitting there with the editor going, ‘F**k! I can’t believe this!’ But I’ve sort of been in the same situation.

“I did a bunch of scenes in ‘Thin Red Line’ and then got a call from Terry [Terrence Malick], saying, ‘We’re cutting out everything except the very last scene.’

“I was like, ‘Please cut me completely out of the movie! Don’t leave me in one scene!’ But, [on Suburbicon], it is one of those where we were just, like, ‘There was no option.’

“He was so great in the film. I never like talking about those kind of things because it can be really unfair to an actor, except to say he was just absolutely great in the movie.”

The movie will premiere at the Venice Film Festival later this month, and stars Matt Damon, Julianne Moore and Oscar Isaac.

Set in 1959, it finds Damon plunged into the dark underbelly of a suburban town and the ‘betrayal, deceit and violence’ that bubbles below the surface.

It’s due out in the UK on November 24.

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