George Clooney famously loves to do nice things for people who have helped him along the way — which is how he ended up making a cameo as Devlin, the head of the fictional spy organization the OSS, in Robert Rodriguez’s Spy Kids.
During a 25th anniversary celebration of the 2001 film at the Academy Museum, Rodriguez explained that it was actually that spirit of reciprocity that led to Clooney’s role in the film. “I’d given him his first big role in From Dusk Till Dawn,” the writer-director told the audience. “So, I knew he owed me a favor. I called him up, and I said, ‘Hey, I’m going to put you in a cameo, you’re going to be the head of the OSS at the end of Spy Kids. Are you free sometime?’”
Clooney offered his former director a date in April, to which Rodriguez replied, “How about Monday? I’ll just come to your house. It’ll just be me. I’ll bring the camera, do the lighting, hold the microphone up. You don’t even have to be wearing anything but a jacket and your pajamas.”
The star agreed, and Rodriguez made good on his promise, showing up solo on a Monday morning to shoot the brief cameo. Clooney took him up on his offer and wore pajama pants with a suit jacket and tie on top to film the scene. In the clever cameo, Clooney appears with a black bar over his face that he removes in a sight gag. Rodriguez tried shooting the scene with Clooney in sunglasses but decided the version with the black bar added in post-production was far funnier.
A few years later, Clooney made another cameo in Spy Kids 3: Game Over, with his character now acting as president of the United States. Once again, Rodriguez shot the scene in Clooney’s living room with the Oscar winner wearing his pajama pants.
Rodriguez shared other memories of making the Spy Kids films, noting that the original 2001 movie is his personal favorite in his filmography. It allowed him to bring his childhood drawings to life, as well as pay tribute to his big Latino family who inspired him to create the Cortez clan.
“My uncle was a special agent in the FBI,” Rodriguez explained. “I remember him showing me his badge when I was a kid. It said, ‘Special Agent, FBI.’ It just fueled my imagination. He actually was the only FBI agent to bring down two top 10 criminals in the U.S. So that really inspired me. His name is Gregorio Rodriguez. That’s why I named Antonio [Banderas] Gregorio Cortez.”
For Rodriguez, a Latin family of spies was an extension of the stories he’d been telling since he was a teenager making movies in his backyard. “This represents the kind of film I’ve been making back in San Antonio since I was in high school,” he said. “I grew up in a family of 10 kids, and the backyard movies I made were always action comedies. But because I didn’t know any actors, I would just use my siblings in them.”
But when Rodriguez tried to sell his script to studios, he faced pushback over the fact that the family at the story’s center is Latin American. “They were like, ‘Why are you making the family Latin? Can’t you just make them American?’” he recalled. “I said, ‘Well, they are American. They’re Latin American. They’re based on my family.’”
Rodriguez argued that it wasn’t the characters’ cultural identity that would bring in audiences, but rather the conceit that they were all spies. “I came up with a winning argument,” the filmmaker continued. “You don’t have to be British to enjoy James Bond. You make it very specific culturally, and it becomes universal. There’s five of these movies now, and it changed the landscape for representation in Hollywood.”
At 25, Spy Kids has left a massive cultural impact in its wake, but for Rodriguez, the movie was always about bringing his childhood fantasies to life — right down to those infamous Thumb-Thumbs, the lumbering evil henchmen who are quite literally all thumbs.
“When I was 16, I was terrible at drawing hands,” Rodriguez remembered. “I used to like to draw. One day, I was trying to figure out how to draw my thumb, and I drew the thumb, and it looked like a head. So then, I drew it as an arm, and another arm, and leg, and a leg, and I created this thing I called a Thumb-Thumb. I had it kicking an eyeball around. I won my first art contest at age 16.”
Seeing that long-ago dream brought to life on screen also inspired Rodriguez to subtitle the second Spy Kids film, The Island of Lost Dreams, in homage to those childhood imaginings. Rodriguez urged the audience to remember that creative little kid while watching the Thumb-Thumbs on the big screen.
“When you see that, just imagine the child inside of you,” he said. “Seeing your little drawing turn into something. That’s the magic of these movies.”
Well, that, and Antonio Banderas’ little stick-on mustache.
