Lessons from Jay Kelly

Some movies simply entertain us. Some make us think. And some, if we let them, can move us to change. Here are some thoughts about the Netflix movie, Jay Kelly.

In the 2025 film Jay Kelly (now on Netflix), George Clooney plays an aging movie star who begins asking the kinds of questions that tend to show up late, uninvited, and impossible to ignore. Questions about meaning and connection. About what all the striving may have cost him.

The film opens with a telling moment. Jay is on set, filming the final scene of his latest movie. The crew resets the lights. The director calls for another take. It’s his seventh time delivering the character’s dying lines. When the director finally calls, “Cut,” Jay pauses and says, almost casually, “Can we go again? I’d like another one. I think I can do it better.”

That line quietly sets the tone for everything that follows.

As the story unfolds, Jay begins to take stock of a successful career built alongside a thin relational life. Surrounded by people for decades, he has missed a deep connection with any of them. For most of his life, that seemed sufficient. Now it doesn’t. And what haunts him most is the growing fear that he may be asking these questions too late.

One of the hardest parts of helping people change is not teaching them how—it’s helping them arrive at the when. Helping them feel the urgency of what matters before regret does the teaching for them. If we could borrow that end-of-life clarity now, what might we choose differently? Who would we move closer to? What comforts would we loosen our grip on? What conversations would we stop postponing?

I can think of plenty of moments in my own life when I’ve wished for a rewind. Sometimes just five minutes. Sometimes a few years. Sometimes far more than that.

The choices we make now determine how much we’ll wish for another later. We may not get another take.