AceShowbiz - George Clooney recruited Gregory Peck's grandson to play his "The Midnight Sky" character as a younger man after abandoning plans to de-age himself onscreen.

The Oscar winner met with Netflix bosses after deciding to direct and star in the new movie and quizzed them about the technology Martin Scorsese used to make Robert De Niro and others look younger in "The Irishman", but eventually decided it would become too much of a talking point if he took years off himself.

" 'The Irishman' used it and had not come out yet," Clooney tells Deadline. "They (Netflix bosses) showed it to me and I thought, 'That'll just become a topic then that people will talk about.' I didn't know how people would react to it at the time. I just said. 'I think you're going to talk about it'. It's tricky because people know basically what I looked like when I was 35 years old."

So he hired Ethan Peck, explaining, "We both have good eyebrows."

"He's better looking than me and if I'm going to cast somebody why not f**king cast somebody who's better looking than me...," George adds. "I said to him, 'Look, my voice is pretty recognizable, so we're going to have to work together, you and I, and we're going to work with... sound. We're going to work with everybody on blending your voice with mine.' "

"It's broken down into hundreds of tiny bits and patterns because it can't be my voice, because my voice was much higher when I was younger. Everybody's voice is higher when they're younger. Funnily enough, his voice is deeper than mine... He's already got this fantastic voice. So I talked to him and said, 'Look, this is going to be a performance where we're going to be sharing the voice. I hope you're OK with that.' "

"He gives such a beautiful performance because he's playing my character at an unlikeable time. The reason that he needs redemption is because of that. So it's a really brave thing he did, which is he came onboard and said, 'Yeah, let's do it. I'm up for it.' "