Bradley Cooper is (Finally) in on the Joke

From the douchey bro of The Hangover movies to the deadly serious actor-director-writer-producer of Maestro, Bradley Cooper has had quite the rebrand. Here, Yasmin Omar explores his evolving stardom – and the surprising levity of his latest persona.   

In the 2000s, Bradley Cooper was That Guy. You know the one. The handsome jerk throwing about homophobic slurs at his best buddy’s bachelor party (The Hangover); the handsome jerk married to Jennifer Connelly but sleeping with Scarlett Johansson (He’s Just Not That Into You); the handsome jerk blowing off an overeager Sandra Bullock with work obligations (All About Steve).

His performance in the latter film earned him and Bullock a Worst Screen Couple Razzie. She good-humouredly turned up to collect her award, giving a charming, self-effacing speech and promising to have a drink with the voters. Cooper declined to go and, we later learned, was creatively frustrated by this spate of mediocre-to-bad comedies. As he told GQ in 2013: ‘Did I feel utterly fulfilled? Absolutely not. But I was grateful and happy to be working, and filling that void in smaller moments.’

There it is: the void. The gaping chasm between Cooper’s ambition and his achievements. He was successful at the time, sure, but not in the way he wanted to be. If the first phase of his career was defined by a parade of almost indistinguishable frat-bro types, the second marked his rebirth as a Serious Actor playing Important Roles.

The turning point came, as Cooper remembers it, with 2014’s Iraq War docudrama American Sniper, in which he stars as a real-life Texan Navy SEAL haunted by his exploits in the field. In interviews for the film, he emphasised the herculean effort that undergirded his performance: he gained 40 pounds of muscle, he spent two hours a day perfecting his Southern accent, he stayed in character throughout the shoot. It’s the kind of tiresome, self-mythologising actor-speak that helps secure Oscar nominations and, if bolstered by good work, a legacy.   

The problem was the press just wasn’t buying it. The memory of the Wolf Pack’s bad-boy antics was perhaps too fresh. Vanity Fair’s December 2014 story hedged its bets on American Sniper, the coverline claiming that ‘Bradley Cooper has balls’ for, as the profile puts it, trying to ‘reach a new dimension in his acting career’. After running through Cooper’s exhaustive preparation for the film – down to the phrases he repeated with his vocal coach – the Vanity Fair writer prevaricates. ‘[This] still doesn’t necessarily add up to a great performance.’

It continues: ‘Maybe this particular role is too serious. Too out of his range [...] Maybe the expectations are too high. Maybe Bradley Cooper really is fucked.’ As we know, the gamble paid off. American Sniper was the first rung on a long ladder he ascended to prestige-drama acceptance, each collaboration with Clint Eastwood or David O’Russell putting more distance between Cooper and the largely disposable movies that made him.

It’s commendable he bridged this gap at all, since the actor spent years dragging the baggage of his early career to every meeting and audition. Case in point: Derek Cianfrance, the director of 2012’s gritty crime thriller The Place Beyond the Pines, said at the time, ‘Honestly, if you’d have told me before I met Bradley that he was the guy for this part, I wouldn’t have believed you.’ The post-Sniper roles bolstered his credibility. These were tough, complex men striving for greatness (the Michelin-star chef in Burnt) or facilitating someone else’s (the self-wringing-mop salesman in Joy).

Off screen, Cooper committed to his new persona. He was a sophisticate now, citing obscure novels in interviews – some of which were conducted in French – and repeating safe, craft-focused stories, with minimal personal anecdote, over and over again. No, he would not be talking about his famous ex-girlfriends or his struggles with alcoholism, thank you very much. As he told Esquire back in 2011, ‘Paul Thomas Anderson does not read Us Weekly and go, “Hey, look at this guy! I want this douchebag in my next film.”’ (Cooper and Anderson did eventually work together a decade later on Licorice Pizza. Us Weekly’s influence was not disclosed.)     

As soon as we collectively came to terms with Bradley Cooper 2.0, the awards-season mainstay and critical darling, he pivoted again. He’d been dropping hints to journalists for years, but now, in 2018, it was finally happening. He was making his directorial debut: an earnest, open-hearted retelling of the timeless musical romance A Star is Born. There were those who embraced it immediately – the film premiered to much fanfare, and great acclaim, at Venice – but what sticks in the memory is its high-profile detractor.

That September, The New York Times ran a contempt-dripping feature entitled ‘Bradley Cooper Is Not Really Into This Profile’, whose first sentence establishes its mocking tone by describing A Star is Born as ‘the movie he specifically, exactingly, meticulously, perfectionistically, obsessively directed, co-wrote and stars in’ (it’s subsequently called, with palpable snark, his ‘Everest of achievement’). 

The Times writer’s mean-spiritedness seems to stem from the fact that Cooper ‘refuses to make a joke, or to acquiesce to one’, instead speaking with ‘intensity’ about the symbolism of his character’s cowboy hat. He’s not who he used to be on screen, someone who made – or at minimum laughed along with – jokes. Perhaps unfairly, Cooper’s self-consciously artsy musings about, for example, the dream that inspired A Star is Born, felt as if they were overcompensating for his lowbrow-comedy roots, which he’s barely acknowledged since stepping behind the camera.

The filmmaker reached his self-seriousness apotheosis on the promotional tour for his 2023 directorial follow-up Maestro, a grand, lushly mounted Leonard Bernstein biopic in which he stars as the legendary composer. He told stories of his six years of conducting practice and four years of prosthetics-building; how the spirit of ‘Lenny was screaming inside me’ and, as a child, his favourite classical-music piece was Tchaikovsky’s ‘Opus 35 in D Major’. A level of aggrandisement is required to survive the furious grind of Oscar campaigning but, even so, this was quite a lot to take.  

Then there are the films themselves. It hasn’t escaped notice that A Star is Born and Maestro  – directed, co-written and produced by Cooper – are Great Man Movies detailing the tribulations of a tortured-genius artist. It also hasn’t escaped notice that Cooper cast himself as both of these Great Men. The opening scene of each film is surprisingly similar: he’s the first actor we see and he’s performing for an audience.

In A Star is Born, Cooper is the rockstar Jackson Maine belting out a song, and soloing on the electric guitar, to a stadium of adoring fans. This neatly maps onto his portrayal of an elderly Leonard Bernstein playing the piano for a camera crew in the first few minutes of Maestro. Despite a hint of vulnerability (Jackson’s pre-show pill-popping and Leonard’s brief emotional outburst), these men are presented as powerful, beloved and important. This characterisation is, of course, complicated over the course of the films, but it offers an insight into how Cooper wants to be perceived when he has creative control. 

Is This Thing On?, his latest directorial effort, breaks these patterns. For a start, it belongs to a genre Cooper has been sprinting away from: comedy. Low-key and low-stakes, it follows schlubby suburbanite Alex (Will Arnett), who stumbles into stand-up as a means of processing his separation from his wife (Laura Dern). With its interest in the vicissitudes of making art and the difficulties of marriage, Is This Thing On? shares thematic DNA with previous Bradley Cooper productions.

Where it differs, for our purposes, is in Cooper’s character. Let us, once again, refer to his introduction (which, it’s worth mentioning, is not the first scene of the film because he plays a supporting role). Cooper strides confidently into his hipster-decorated New York apartment, before tripping over, falling to the floor and exploding an entire carton of oat milk. Grinning sheepishly, he goes to wipe up the spillage using not one sheet of kitchen paper, but the flat of the entire roll. It’s a comically inept entrance for the performer – we’re not in Great Man territory anymore. 

As the scene progresses, we get to know the character. He’s called Balls, a name that’s never explained and could only have been workshopped in a frathouse, and he’s an actor. Despite being an understudy in an off-off-Broadway ecclesiastical drama, he takes his craft very seriously. ‘Do I look like a disciple?’ he muses, stroking the beard he’s grown for the role he’s contractually unlikely to ever portray. ‘The life of an artist!’ You don’t have to squint too hard to realise that Cooper is using this pretentious-loser actor to gently poke fun at himself and his own Method-adjacent practices. Balls’ remark that ‘half of me is always in the play’ almost directly correlates with Cooper’s own 2023 quote to The New Yorker, ‘my characters live inside me’. 

By finally stepping out of the full glare of the spotlight for Is This Thing On?, and taking on the part of a buffoon who turns up high to an 11-year-old’s birthday party, the filmmaker injects some levity into his increasingly humourless public image. It’s not a return to form for the actor, but something altogether new.

Where he was the reactive straight man in Todd Phillips comedies, here he mines laughs by delivering ridiculous lines with a guileless sincerity. He appears looser and more carefree during press engagements, too. At a New York Film Festival panel for the movie, Cooper self-deprecatingly said, ‘if I’d played his [Arnett’s] role, then I would’ve been a mess’ to knowing chuckles from the crowd. We might well be witnessing the arrival of Bradley Cooper 3.0.   

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