George Clooney insists he won't be making any more ER appearances since his surprise return last May for Julianna Margulies's final episode but jokes that he might make an exception if Anthony Edwards's character, Dr. Mark Greene, succumbs to his brain tumor. "Maybe I should come back and [escort] him off the show too," says Clooney, 39, who left the NBC series in 1999 to concentrate on films (his latest is the Coen brothers' comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?). "I know," he says. "I'll return every time someone wants to quit. I'll pick up alumni from ER and bring them to the film community. I'll bring them to that pier where Julianna Margulies found me. I'll be saying, 'Mark, look towards the light.' "
Survivor of the Fittest
Survivor's Colleen Haskell plans to be glued to the tube when Survivor: The Australian Outback airs. "I'll be watching it, worrying about the poor little kiddies who get [booted] off," says Haskell of the sequel, which kicks off Jan. 28, immediately following the Super Bowl on CBS. While Haskell, 24, has fared well—she's costar-ring with Rob Schneider in the comedy Animal, due later this year—she has some advice for the new castaways: "Watch out for the big bad entertainment industry that's going to eat you up. That's the hardest part of Survivor—after the show is over—without question, harder than being on the show, harder than eating bugs and rats."
See Cruz
For Penélope Cruz, working with Tom Cruise on their just-completed drama Vanilla Sky often meant a daily case of mistaken identity. "We joked every day on-set about the name problems," says Cruz, who now costars with Matt Damon in All the Pretty Horses. "There's Cruz and Cruise. Plus Cameron Crowe our director and Cameron Diaz. It gets very confusing." A tougher task for the Spanish actress, 26, is fending off rumors of a romance with Damon, but she understands that gossip comes with the territory. "I hate when actors complain about loss of privacy," she says. "If you don't want to be famous, go do theater in a little village."
No House of Girth
To Laura Linney, filming her turn-of-the-century drama The House of Mirth, based on Edith Wharton's novel, was no laughing matter. "The days were long and those corsets are wildly uncomfortable, so all the women were trying to comfort each other," says Linney, 36. "It took five inches off my waist! It was painful! And we were in those for hours every day. How did those women put up with it?"
Hail to the Coif
When he signed on to play John F. Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis drama Thirteen Days, Bruce Greenwood asked not what he could do for his hairstylist, but what his hairstylist could do for him. "We all have this image of [JFK]—that tousled, wind-blown chunk of hair you could hide a football in," says Greenwood, 44. "But my hair didn't quite work, so we added a little 'squirrel tail.' The hairdresser would bring it every morning, dangle it in front of me and then spend a half hour gluing it on, pouffing and fluffing it. Luckily we didn't spend any time doing a 'walking on the beach with my hair being blown' scene."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
