George Clooney: 'Batman & Robin' is 'a bad film, and I'm bad in it'

George Clooney has said that starring as Batman in Joel Schumacher's 1997 disaster picture Batman & Robin taught him to prioritise scripts over parts.

In an interview with Empire, the screen icon said that valuable lessons were learned, and since then he's chosen consistently better projects.

“I was bad in it. It's a bad film,” he said of the movie, which pitted his Bruce Wayne against Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr Freeze and Uma Thurman's Poison Ivy.

Watch: The Midnight Sky teaser trailer

It also pitted Clooney against the infamous 'nipple suit', which the actor struggled to live down ever since.

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“But I was also being held responsible for it, in a weird way. Then I realised; if you're gonna be Batman in Batman & Robin, you're gonna be held responsible. Which never occurred to me. To me, I was still an actor getting a part. From that moment on, I was like, 'I have to pick the script, not the part.'

“So the next script I did was Out of Sight and the next I did was Three Kings. After that, O Brother, Where Art Thou? The scripts changed considerably. Everybody would say that Batman was not the best. But the good news for me was I was able to take that as a lesson, as opposed to a career-ended.”

Clooney also went on to say that 'everybody was having a tough time' while making the movie, which took a gruelling eight months to shoot while he was still starring as Dr. Doug Ross on medical drama ER.

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He added that 'I was doing ER while I was doing it – four days a week on Batman, three days a week on ER. Seven days a week. That one was just a slog'.

In a multi-verse style twist, former Batmen Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck will reportedly be appearing in the forthcoming Flash movie from DC, though Clooney added that 'it's funny – you'll notice they didn't call me. Somehow I didn't get that call. They did not ask for my nipples'.

Clooney, who has concentrated more on philanthropy and directing in recent years, is next up in own movie The Midnight Sky, his first feature since 2016's Money Monster.

Both behind and in front of the camera, he plays an Arctic scientist trying to stop a mission of astronauts returning to Earth following a global catastrophe.

It lands on Netflix in December.