Cover Story: Bradley Cooper
Bradley Cooper's long hot summer
The Hangover lit the fire, partying with an array of starlets kept the flames going, and now Bradley Cooper opens All About Steve, playing the object of Sandra Bullock’s obsession. Who is this guy?
By Glenn Whipp
Bradley Cooper began the year as something of a poor man’s Matthew McConaughey, a great-looking actor blessed with great hair and an innate ability to maintain a perfect layer of facial stubble. But outside of his turn as Rachel McAdams’ aggressively obnoxious boyfriend in Wedding Crashers, Cooper hadn’t really punched through into the public’s consciousness.
That relative anonymity ended this summer when his raunchy, boys-gone-wild comedy The Hangover became the highest-grossing R-rated comedy of all time. Mix in Cooper’s appearance earlier this year in the ensemble romantic-comedy He’s Just Not That Into You and a lead role in the upcoming All About Steve and you have the clear makings of a career year for the 34-year-old.
“The attention is great because it means I made some good choices,” Cooper says in a recent Los Angeles interview. “When we were making The Hangover, we all knew we had something really special.”
All About Steve was actually shot before The Hangover, but arrives later after having its release date bumped from March of this year to September. Cooper plays the title character, a cable news cameraman who’s convinced that he’s being stalked by a kooky crossword-puzzle designer (Sandra Bullock).
Cooper has nothing but good things to say about the film — except for the premise, which he finds a bit incredible.
“When I was auditioning for it, I figured if I was in the audience, I’d think, ‘Hey guy, it’s Sandra Bullock. What’s your problem?’” Cooper recalls. “Now, I’ve never been stalked, but if I was being stalked by Sandra Bullock, that stalking would end very soon.”
The movie’s complication is that Bullock’s character, Mary, really isn’t a psychotic. Delusional? Sure. Desperate? A little. Mary believes, after one blind date, that Steve is her soulmate. Steve doesn’t share that belief and takes a natural out — he’s leaving on assignment for Oklahoma. But then Mary shows up in Oklahoma, and everything isn’t OK.
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Bradley Cooper and Sandra Bullock in
All About Steve
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“I think most people would be bemused,” says All About Steve
director Phil Traill of the premise. “And he’s brilliant at it,
Bradley. He gives it such great nuance. He’s not all out scratching his
head. Bradley excels at giving a realistic portrayal of a character, so
you don’t really feel there’s any acting going on. It’s a real person
feeling something.”
You certainly got that impression watching Cooper in The Hangover as
his character coped with the morning-after effects (a tiger in the
bathroom, a baby in the closet, a missing groom) of a Vegas binge
bachelor party. Here Cooper showed his talent for playing an arrogant
leader of the pack, the kind of guy who thinks he knows all the answers
and would, without any guilt, funnel his high school students’
field-trip money into his gambling reserves.
Cooper snagged “Comedy Star of the Year” honours at this year’s
ShoWest, an annual convention for movie exhibitors, and it was largely
connected to his work in The Hangover. Cooper believes the
movie worked so well because it had Vegas in its blood, filming on
location in Sin City for the first month of the 45-day shoot.
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“We stayed at Caesars Palace for a month and let me tell you man, it was intense,” Cooper says. “You get up in the morning, you walk downstairs and you hear those slots, man. All day long. The world is completely indifferent to what you’re doing. For two days we’re making a movie in the valet area, right at the entrance to the casino, and you walk 10 feet into the revolving doors and no one cares that you’re shooting a movie. It’s all about the nickel slots.”
Hearing the jingle-jangle of those slots for a month straight worked on Cooper’s psyche. Like most who go to Vegas from Los Angeles, Cooper sees the city as a weekend destination whose allure wears thin after 48 hours.
“Being there for a month was like being on some weird acid trip, it really was,” Cooper says. “It messes with your chemistry, which was perfect for the movie.
“Most films key in on the glamour of Vegas,” Cooper adds. “[This] was Vegas during the day. And you don’t ever want to see Vegas during the day. It’s ugly.”
No word yet whether Cooper and the boys will return to that ugliness in the inevitable Hangover sequel, which Warner Bros. began developing even before the movie crossed $200-million in ticket sales. Cooper just returned from promoting the film overseas, but has been in the news lately as much for going out to dinner with Jennifer Aniston as he has for starring in one of the summer’s biggest movies.
“Well, he definitely gets noticed,” Traill says, recalling playing tennis with Cooper and how the actor attracted plenty of attention from the opposite sex, most of which was focused on his physique and not his volley.
“But guys like him as well,” Traill adds. “He’s fairly alpha male — blue-eyed, blond hair, built. He’s not a girlie guy. So you can imagine him getting angry and being macho.”
Cooper displays little of that edge in conversation, happy to chat up co-stars (Ken Jeong, the effeminate Asian crime lord in The Hangover and a co-star in All About Steve, is a particular favourite), express an undying love for his dogs (he has a German Shorthaired Pointer and a Chow-Retriever mix) and talk about his participation in a USO tour in Afghanistan this past February.
Besides Steve, he has one more movie on tap this year, New York, I Love You, a collection of 12 short films from the producers of Paris, je t’aime. Cooper appears opposite Drea de Matteo (The Sopranos) in a segment shot in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.
“There’s no dialogue…it’s all about behaviour with voiceover,” Cooper says of the Hughes Brothers-directed short.
For a guy used to attracting attention without words, it sounds perfect.
Glenn Whipp lives in Los Angeles where he writes about movies and the people who make them.
6 Random Facts about Bradley Cooper
• He was born in Philadelphia on January 5th, 1975, to an Italian-American mom and Irish-American dad, and although he now lives in Los Angeles he’s been known to visit The Shack, a Santa Monica restaurant that’s a hangout for former Philadelphians.
• After earning his B.A. from Georgetown University, Cooper attended The Actors Studio Drama School in New York City, famed for being home to Inside the Actors Studio, the talk show hosted by James Lipton.
• His first professional, on-screen acting gig came in the 1999 Sex and the City episode “They Shoot Single People, Don’t They?” He played Jake, a single guy Carrie meets at a party while drunk.
• In March 2006 he earned mixed reviews starring opposite Julia Roberts and Paul Rudd in a Broadway production of Three Days of Rain. New York Times critic Ben Brantley said of his performance, “Mr. Cooper is alternately perky and indignant in the manner of a sitcom actor doing testy and aggrieved.”
• In December 2006 he married fellow actor Jennifer Esposito (TV’s Spin City, Rescue Me). They separated four months later and eventually divorced. Publicly, the pair said remarkably little about their relationship before, during and after the marriage.
• He’ll play Faceman (Dirk Benedict’s old part) to Liam Neeson’s Hannibal in the big-screen adaptation of TV’s The A-Team, due out next June.
—Marni Weisz