Matt Damon fears he and pal Brad Pitt are responsible for prompting an male fan to strip and proposition George Clooney at a recent press conference after suggesting their Ocean's Eleven co-star was secretly gay.

Clooney was promoting his new comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats on Tuesday at Italy's Venice Film Festival when a stripper posing as a journalist professed his love for the Hollywood star.

Video footage of the encounter has popped up all over the internet ever since, and it has forced Damon to make a confession.

Damon admits he fueled gossip Clooney was secretly in love with another man and that the couple planned to marry.

He says, "I was at the Venice Film Festival last week and Brad Pitt was there doing interviews for Inglourious Basterds and I guess people had been asking him, 'When are you and Angelina Jolie going to get married?' and he finally just said, 'Me and Angelina will marry when George Clooney marries his boyfriend!'

"The thing is, you do that in America and they just laugh; you do that overseas and I guess something gets lost in translation, so at eight in the morning, I'm doing interviews and this Italian journalist comes to me and says, 'Matt, is it true what Brad say (sic)?' I had no idea what he was talking about so I just said, 'Of course, yeah.'

"And he says, 'Do you mean George Clooney has a boyfriend?' I'm trying to keep a straight face so I go, 'Yeah, of course he's got a boyfriend,' and he goes, 'You mean, he wants to marry him? You know this man?' And we've been doing this for years so I go, 'Yeah, I know this man, he's great, that's why we want them to get married!'"

But Damon was left red-faced when he realized the ongoing prank may have led to the striptease during Clooney's press chat later.

He adds, "George is coming (to Venice) the next day, I go back to New York and the next day I wake up, turn on the news and on CNN the headline says, 'Man strips for George Clooney'. And there's a video of this guy who stands up and says, 'George, I am a gay and you are gay.' And George is like, 'What's going on?' Then this guy starts taking his clothes off, and goes, 'If you must choose, choose me!'"



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(This news article provided by World Entertainment News Network)