On April 3, George Clooney will make his Broadway debut at 63 years old.

The actor, best known for his television and film roles, is taking on the role of hard-hitting journalist and news anchor Edward R. Murrow in the Broadway show he helped write, “Good Night and Good Luck.”

It’s a part he could have played 20 years ago when the movie of the same name hit the big screen, but instead he played Murrow’s producer Fred Friendly.

“Murrow had a gravitas to him that at 42 years old I didn’t,” Clooney told “60 Minutes”, “I wasn’t able to pull off.”

Now, with a “proper old Broadway” set as his backdrop, Clooney feels ready to take it on.

“It’s exciting to be here, you know?” he said. “Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s nerve-wracking and there’s a million reasons why it’s dumb to do.”

“It’s dumb to do because you’re coming out and saying, ‘Well, let’s try to get an audience to take this ride with you back to 1954.’”

However, it’s a scene Clooney is familiar with. After all, he spent his childhood in newsrooms with his father, Nick Clooney, who was an established journalist and anchor himself.

“When I was 12 years old, my dad was working at WKRC in Cincinnati. I would run the teleprompter,” he recounted.

But Broadway is unlike anything Clooney has ever done.

He’s acting in real time. As “60 Minutes’” Jon Wertheim tells Clooney, the audience “can see you, you can see them too.”

To which, Clooney responded saying, “I’m not looking at them.”

“I’m putting my wife in the very, very, very back,” he noted.

In preparation for the role, Clooney moved his family, including his wife of 10 years, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, and their two children, 7-year-old twins Ella and Alexander, from Europe to New York City.

And when asked if he wishes he would have acted on Broadway earlier in his career, Clooney admits he doesn’t know if he could have. “I didn’t do the work required to get there.”

But that doesn’t mean it’s not “cool” to be there now.

“Anybody who would deny that would just be a liar,” Clooney said of his Broadway debut.

“I mean, there isn’t a single actor alive that wouldn’t have loved to have, you know, been on Broadway. So that’s the fun of it. It’s trickier the older you get. But why not?”

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