George Clooney gets snippy at question about his commitment to refugees

George Clooney wore both his hats — movie star and humanitarian activist — in Berlin on Friday, where's he's promoting his latest, Hail, Caesar!, and meeting with refugees in the center of Europe's current refugee crisis.

Clooney lost a bit of his famous cool at a Berlin Film Festival press conference Thursday when a reporter asked what else he's been doing, beyond making movies, to ease the ongoing refugee crisis.

"I spend a lot of time working on these things, and it's an odd thing to have someone stand up and say, 'What do you do?' That's fine, knock yourself out," a peeved Clooney snapped, according to media reports. "I have gone to places that are very dangerous and I work a lot on these things."

Then, to the provoking reporter, he demanded, "I'd like to know what you are doing to help the situation?"

On Friday, he and wife Amal Alamuddin Clooney, herself a renown human-rights lawyer/activist, had a much friendlier encounter with Germany's leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who's been the leading voice in Europe for accepting huge numbers of hapless refugees from Syria and other areas of conflict in the Middle East.

“I absolutely agree with her,” Clooney told reporters.

After the 40-minute meeting, he said in an interview with German TV that they talked mostly about "what we can do and what part of this we can talk about in the United States, because you know in the United States we aren't doing enough...We are a little less involved that we should be," Clooney said.

Later Friday, the Clooneys are scheduled to meet with recent refugees in Berlin.

Even if Clooney himself has been active in humanitarian crises around the world, he acknowledged at the Hail, Caesar! press conference that the film industry has been too slow to react.

“The unfortunate thing about the film community is we react to situations much more than we lead the way,” he said.

Contributing: The Associated Press