NEW YORK • As George Clooney flew through the air after being flung from his motorcycle, his life did not flash before his eyes.
Instead, he thought of his twins, Alexander and Ella, who were one year old at the time of the accident in 2018.
"Mostly it was just the thought that this was it and that I wasn't gonna see them again," the actor-director said in an interview published in GQ magazine's December/January issue, in which he was named Icon of the Year.
Opening up for the first time about details of the near-fatal crash, which took place in Sardinia, Italy, he recounted that he was riding at 120kmh on his motorcycle to the set of the Catch-22 television series, when a car turned directly in front of him.
"I launched. I went head over heels. But I landed on my hands and knees. If you did it 100 times, maybe once, you land on your hands and knees. Any other version you land, you're toast. It knocked me out of my shoes," he said.
He crushed the car's windshield with his helmet and his mouth was full of glass when he hit the ground.
From his years of experience in riding motorcycles, the 59-year-old expected to be paralysed from such an impact and so he lay on the road, "waiting for the switch to turn off".
Fortunately, despite the spectacular crash, he did not sustain serious injuries and the only consequence he suffered was that his wife Amal Clooney has since banned him from riding motorcycles.
Married since 2014, he revealed in the interview that before meeting his wife, he thought he would remain a bachelor, albeit one of the most eligible ones in Hollywood.
He added: "My life is full. I'm doing well. And I didn't know how un-full it was until I met Amal. And then, everything changed.
"And I was like, 'Oh, actually, this has been a huge empty space.'"
For the past year, he has been happily working from home with his wife and kids, isolating themselves as a precaution due to his age and also because his son is asthmatic.
"I cut my own hair and I cut my kids' hair and I'm mopping and vacuuming and doing the laundry and doing the dishes every day," he said.
