This Is How George Clooney Dropped a Surprising Proposal to Amal

George Clooney couldn’t have been more sincere when he proposed to Amal Alamuddin last year after seven months of dating, but even he couldn’t resist letting some of his trademark humor slip in that all-important moment.

“It was completely unexpected, so finally I just said ‘Listen, I’m 52 [at the time] and I’ve been on my knee now for about 28 minutes, so I gotta get an answer out of this or I’m gonna throw a hip out!” he told longtime friend Charlie Rose on CBS This Morning during a candid chat at the top of One World Trade Center Tower.

As the world knows, the respected human-rights lawyer indeed said yes, and the Oscar winner shared more details about the intimate proposal, which happened at home while “I queued up a playlist of some of my Aunt Rosemary’s songs.”

“I knew fairly quickly that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Amal,” he said. “When I asked her we had never talked about it. There wasn’t like ‘Maybe we should get married.’ I dropped it on her!”

Clearly smitten, Clooney, now 54, talks sweetly about how his wife has made him happier than he has ever known, and the duo have vowed to never spend more than a week apart.

“I have someone I can talk to about anything and someone who I care about more than I’ve cared about anything, so it’s really nice,” he said.

The Tomorrowland actor was considerably less gushy in a new interview with Vulture as he discussed a topic that puts a smile on few people’s faces: dealing with Internet trolls.

“Now you can just sit alone and say horrible things, and it becomes fashionable to be sh—y to people,” he said.

Clooney has been the subject of online hate many times, of course, though he partly mitigates that by not being on social media. (“Don’t ever read comments on anything!” says adds.) But then, people feel entitled to be blunt in person, too.

“Now people will come up to me, thinking they’re keeping it real, and they say, ‘I hated you in that last movie!’ ” he says. “And I’ll look at them and go, ‘Well, I think those extra 20 pounds look good on you.’ It’s become a much more cynical time, a time when people think it’s fun to only be negative.”

His solution? Just don’t engage with the haters.

“That’s not gonna be how I function,” he says. “I’m not gonna function in that world, where negativity is going to be the centerpiece. I’m going to look to the better angels and have a better life because of it.”

This article originally appeared on People.com.