George Clooney talks through how he was the first character cast on 'ER'

George Clooney is a busy A-list icon, but he wasn't too busy for BAFTA's "Life in Pictures" series.

The two-time Oscar winner walked through his illustrious career with Francine Scott for nearly 90 minutes, but it only took a little over three minutes to get to ER. Clooney described how he was cast as Dr. Doug Ross, the breakout role that would make him a household name:

"I was under contract to Warner Bros. and was shopped out doing lots of different shows, and I was doing guest appearances on a show called Sisters, which had been on the air for about six years. It was a good show, but you know, I was like the seventh or eighth banana on it. And they called me at the end of that season and said, 'We'd like you to be a regular,' which would mean getting paid. I was getting paid what a day player gets paid on a show. I was like, you know, I don't really want to be a regular in the sixth year of a show.

"In the meantime, this script had come out. John Wells, whose the real savior of this script, and John was doing that and he was also doing a sitcom. He wanted me to do the sitcom, and I read the [ER] script and I said, 'Well, I want to do this part.' And he said, 'Well, the main part is gonna go to somebody else. You're not right for the lead, but if you want to play No. 5 on the call sheet ... then come in and read.' And I came in and I read, so I was the first one to get a part of anybody on ER."

Dr. Doug Ross's arc turned him from a drunk womanizing ER pediatrician into the on-screen love of Julianna Marguiles's head ER nurse Carol Hathaway. The primetime medical drama ran from 1994 to 2009, claiming 23 Primetime Emmys along the way, and was the longest-running of its kind until Grey's Anatomy surpassed it in February 2019.

Later in the "Life in Pictures" interview, Clooney revealed how the Steven Soderbergh-directed 1998 film Out of Sight served as his first big-screen success after getting "killed" for 1997's universally panned Batman & Robin:

"The script came my way. It had been a year—I'd gotten killed for doing Batman & Robin, and I understood for the first time because, quite honestly, when I got Batman & Robin, I was just an actor getting an acting job, and I was excited to play Batman. What I realized after that was I was gonna be held responsible for the movie itself—not just for my performance or what I was doing. And so, I knew I needed to focus on better scripts. The script was the most important thing. You can't make a good film out a bad script. It's impossible.

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"I was on my back foot coming off of a couple of films that didn't do well, and Steven was on his back foot from a movie called The Underneath that wasn't critically acclaimed and didn't go anywhere. And we both needed this to be a success. And it was. Now, it's funny. People look at it now and think it was a hit. It was a bomb. You know, it didn't make a dime. Lost money. ... But it was a critical darling, and everybody loved it, and it changed my career in terms of from that point on I was gonna be allowed to make movies. And I wasn't before that. It was all up in the air of if I was allowed to move from TV to film."

Clooney and Soderbergh would go on to successfully collaborate several more times over the years.

Clooney eventually tried his own hand at directing, too, beginning with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) and leading to The Ides of March (2011), The Monuments Men (2014) and, most recently, The Midnight Sky (2020).

Watch the 60-year-old earnestly reflect on it all in the full "Life in Pictures" installment below.