George Clooney has a cheeky dig at celebs who pick crazy baby names

George Clooney has had a sly dig at fellow celebrities who pick outlandish names for their offspring, telling Paris Match that his twins would “already have enough difficulty bearing the weight of their celebrity”.

The movie star’s comments come just after singer Beyonce and rapper Jay-Z revealed that their own new twins were called Sir and Rumi, while Kim Kardashian and Kanye West named their daughter North West and son Saint. Clooney and wife Amal, meanwhile, plumped for far more ordinary Ella and Alexander for their twins.

“I didn’t want to give them one of those ridiculous Hollywood names that don’t mean anything,” 56-year-old Clooney told the French magazine. He’d previously said that he knew his children would have their every move watched, so didn’t want them to also have to deal with unusual names.

“We didn’t have any great inspiration,” the actor told Entertainment Tonight earlier this month. “It wasn’t Alexander the Great and Ella Fitzgerald.”

Clooney said that his son, Alex, was already sitting up at three months old, while daughter Ella was already “elegant” and the image of her gorgeous mother, with “big, black eyes”.

The actor and director is currently in Toronto, Canada, to promote Suburbicon, a movie written by the celebrated Coen Brothers, that he directed. Good friend Matt Damon is the star of the movie, which is about a fictional suburban community in 1959 that is hiding a dark underbelly.

Amal and the twins didn’t travel to the Toronto International Film Festival with him, though, with Clooney telling reporters at the event that the babies “wouldn’t remember it”.

Do you think giving children unusual names makes it harder for them as adults?