Why Amal Clooney Took 20 Minutes to Accept George’s Proposal

George Clooney has been married to human rights lawyer and activist Amal Alamuddin Clooney since 2014, and the two are parents to three-year-old twins, Ella and Alexander. However, that’s about all we know about their personal life—the couple rarely opens up about it.  

But Clooney recently spoke about his family in an interview while promoting The Midnight Sky, the new Netflix movie he directs and costars in with Felicity Jones and Kyle Chandler. (It starts streaming on December 10.) 

“There is no question that having Amal in my life changed everything for me,” he told CBS This Morning. “It was the first time that everything that she did and everything about her was infinitely more important than anything about me.

“And then we had these two knuckleheads,” Clooney continued. “It is very fulfilling and something I wasn’t at all…didn’t see coming.” 

He added, “We never talked about marriage when we we were dating, and I asked her out of the blue. It took her a long time to say yes…I was on my knee for, like, 20 minutes. I finally said, ‘Look I’m going to throw my hip out.’ We told that story to her parents and they were like, ‘There’s something wrong with his hip?’ And we never talked about having kids and one day we said, ‘What do you think?’ And then we go to the doctor and you do the ultrasound and they’re like, ‘You got a baby boy!’ and I was like, ‘Baby boy, fantastic!’ And they go, ‘And you got another one there.’ I was up for one. Again, I’m old. All of a sudden, it’s two. It’s hard to get me to not talk, and I just stood there for, like, 10 minutes just staring at this piece of paper going, ‘What? Two?’”

Watch George Clooney’s full interview, above.