George Clooney says Trump was just a 'knucklehead' who was always 'chasing girls' before he was president

• George Clooney said Trump was "just this knucklehead" before he was president.
• "He was just a guy who was chasing girls," Clooney told BBC.

Award-winning actor and director George Clooney in a new interview on Sunday said he hopes the US will move past former President Donald Trump.

"He's going to be a factor for a while. It's so funny because, you know, he was just this knucklehead," Clooney said of Trump on the BBC's "The Andrew Marr Show."

"I knew him before he was a president. He was just a guy who was chasing girls. Every time you went out, he'd come over and be like, 'What's the name of that girl?' That's all he was," Clooney added.

Since he left office, Trump has stayed in the spotlight and tried to maintain his grip on national politics, with many GOP officials rallying around him and voters expressing their support for him as the party's leader. The former president has also repeatedly teased a 2024 run.

Clooney acknowledged Trump's following, saying: "He's going to play this out for a while and we'll see where we go with it as a country.

But "my hope is we have a little better sense than" to put Trump in the White House again, Clooney added.

Clooney, a Democrat, also weighed in on President Joe Biden's recent declining approval ratings, saying that he's still struggling to repair the country after Trump.

"It's like taking a battered child and thinking everything's going to be OK his first day in school," the movie star said. "There's a lot of things that have to be repaired. There's a lot of healing that has to happen and it's going to take time."

"Poll numbers come up and go down. I would expect them to go back up again," he added.

Clooney also shut down any ideas of him leaving Hollywood to run for public office.

"I actually would like to have a nice life," Clooney said. "I'm 60 and I can still play basketball and still do the things I love. But in 20 years, I'll be 80 ... We have to make sure we enjoy and live these years in the best possible way."