INTERVIEW:The Hollywood star-making machine has been rather unproductive of late, but Bradley Cooper has shown enough versatility, and bankability, to suggest he could be the new big-screen dreamboat. He tells DONALD CLARKEabout moving up the movie food chain
WHERE’S OUR NEXT DREAMBOAT? James Franco blotted his copybook with that surly performance at the Oscars. Robert Pattinson has still to escape from the shadow of Twilight. Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt? Oh come along. They’re both closing in on 50. You’ll have to try harder than that.
Bradley Cooper might be the man. Now 35, he’s paid his dues, but he’s still young enough to run up the stairs without puffing. He’s funny. He’s smart. And he’s got the fine, chiselled features of a resting surfer.
Two years ago, when I first met him, Cooper was doing well enough to avoid having to consider taxi driving or bar work. He'd clocked up regular gigs on the TV shows Aliasand Nip/Tuck. He'd played a version of Anthony Bourdain on the small-screen version of Kitchen Confidential.Then The Hangoverbroke. Todd Phillips's agreeable comedy, in which three layabouts got wrecked in Las Vegas, was the surprise hit of 2009. In Ireland, despite going up against Harry Potter 6, Twilight 2and Transformers 2, it was easily the most successful film of the year.
Mr Cooper was a face. (Later, regrettably, in the awful The A-Team, he actually became “Face”.)
“We first heard about the success when we were doing press in Dublin,” he explains. “We thought it would open with about $17 million and it opened with $35 million. And then it kept growing each week. That isn’t supposed to happen – particularly during the summer, when you have all those big movies.”
Can he explain why it was so big? The Hangoverwasn't the first comedy concerning badly behaved men.
“No. I can’t. If I could, I’d have made five of them. We didn’t know. I remember shooting in the back lot of a casino in 95-degree heat. It was the scene where Ken Jeong, playing Mr Chow, jumps out of the car naked. I just thought, what is this movie? What is it? But we did allow ourselves to think it was very funny.”
It's taken a while for Cooper to secure another suitable lead role. The least said about All About Steve(the weird comedy for which Sandra Bullock won her Golden Raspberry Award) and The A-Team (a film that made the original series look like Brideshead Revisited) the soonest forgotten and the soonest mended.
Consider, instead, this week's Limitless. Neil Burger's exciting picture focuses on a writer who, seriously blocked, takes a pill that promises to heighten his intellect and spur his creativity. (One can easily imagine how Alan Glynn, gifted Irish writer of the source novel, The Dark Fields, came up with the spiffing idea.) Soon, Cooper is an acclaimed author, promiscuous polyglot and successful financial wizard. But there is (you guessed it) a downside. Troubling side effects send him slightly crazy.
“It is really different. Isn’t it?” he says with an ingenuous smile. “It’s hard to come up with something new in this genre. You can’t help but think: would I take the pill, knowing the side effects? I guess the answer is yes. But maybe only the once.” The beginning of the film finds the protagonist in a state of wretched decline. His flat is a mess. His hair is matted. The failure to finish writing a worthwhile sentence has, essentially, turned him into a tramp. It must, for somebody so used to playing the suave charmer, have been fun to mess himself up.
“We loved that. We loved it. We lamented the day we had to put the wig away. I used to go out dressed like that in New York’s Chinatown and nobody recognised me. Not that anybody would have said anything in Chinatown, anyway. It’s such a madly busy place they don’t bother noticing anybody.”
Getting recognised has, presumably, become a problem for Cooper over the last two years. A success such as The Hangovercan really change things for an actor. One day you are a "respected professional". The next the trade papers are asking troubling questions such as: "Can Bradley Cooper deliver?" Did he feel that life had altered overnight? "To an extent. It changed to the extent that there are now opportunities that I never would have gotten. I made more money for Hangover 2than I ever thought possible. And the other thing would be the paparazzi. It started to happen even before the film came out. Then suddenly I had people outside my door."
Married to the actress Jennifer Esposito from 2006 to 2007, Cooper has been dating Renée Zellweger for a little over a year. When I raise her name, he politely – but very firmly – states that he "doesn't talk about that". This is a very wise strategy. His silence will not, however, stop the tabloids from chattering. In the aftermath of The Hangover, Cooper suddenly found the most absurd, sometimes hilarious stories appearing regularly in the chatter mags. He explains that, on one occasion, it was reported that he had taken Jennifer Aniston to a candle-lit dinner at his Bel Air mansion.
“Neil Simon has this line to the effect that once something is written down it has an inherent truth. I still half-believe that. I don’t live in Bel Air. I have a small house in Venice. I have only met Jennifer once at a party. I don’t even own any candles. The creativity on display is almost impressive.”
He laughs the story off. But there must be times when the inventive lies hurt just a little. “It’s funny, but the one story that did disturb me a little was when they said they had taken my dogs to a pet spa. As it happened, the story came out right after my own dog had died. And my dogs were all rescued from the pound. So that wasn’t really going to happen. I did actually ask my agent if there’s anything you can do about that. But there isn’t.”
Cooper does seem to have his feet on the ground. Raised in a well-off area of Philadelphia, his parents, both of whom came from working-class backgrounds, worked hard to secure him a decent education. He doesn’t like to think how much it cost them to put him through the prestigious Georgetown University in Washington DC. Following graduation, having never acted before, he somehow secured a place in the Actors Studio Drama School at the New School University in New York. His folks were worried – although Cooper paid his own tuition – but came round when they saw how comfortable he seemed on stage.
We have been led to believe that, at the Actors Studio, alma mater of Dustin Hoffman, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and many other troubled geniuses, students spend their days pretending to be spider monkeys and reliving painful experiences from their awful childhoods.
“No. It’s not like that at all,” he laughs. “It’s not so hard to get in now. It’s not like getting into Yale Drama School, where they only take in a few people. But it is a tremendous experience. Having never acted before, to be among people who cared about acting was an amazing experience. And the teaching is extraordinary.”
As he intimated earlier, Cooper will next be exercising his thespian talents on a sequel to The Hangover.The good news for fans of the first film is that, "It takes place in Thailand. Mr Chow is back. Mike Tyson is back. And there's a drug-dealing monkey."
Talk of Mike Tyson reminds us of a minor scandal that has kicked up around The Hangover 2.A few months ago it was reported that some cast members had rebelled against plans to offer a cameo to Mel Gibson. Zach Galifianakis was, apparently, particularly upset at the notion of casting a man who had recently been overheard making racist remarks and who had reportedly been physically abusive to his girlfriend. (Early this month, Gibson pleaded "no contest" to a misdemeanour charge of battering Oksana Grigorieva.) Liam Neeson replaced Gibson in the film. More than a few commentators felt that, by allowing Tyson, a convicted rapist, to take a role, the film-makers were guilty of hypocrisy.
I am barely through the question, before Cooper has adopted his polite but firm face. “I just don’t talk about that. I could, but I don’t want to.”
Very sensible. Very professional. You’re going the right way about securing dreamboat status, Mr Cooper.
Limitlessis on general release
DREAMBOATS OF THE DECADES
1930s CLARK GABLE
All the key elements of the dreamboat aesthetic were in place when Gable, star of
Gone With the Wind, ambled on to the screen during the depression years. Charming, yet roguish.
1940s CARY GRANT
It is some measure of Grant's durable allure that he could be our nomination for both the 1930s and the 1950s. His uncertain, mid-Atlantic accent added to the delicious mystery.
1950s ROCK HUDSON
The Eisenhower years seemed to throw up the most conformist dreamboats: slim suits, oiled hair, square foreheads.
But Doris Day's endlessly amusing co-star had a secret.
1960s STEVE McQUEEN
The swinging era required a dreamboat who made some sort of gestures towards the counter-culture. Steve McQueen wasn't quite that man. But he did ride a motorbike.
1970s ROBERT REDFORD
What a strange decade. The movie tomes all talk about a post-Easy Rider revolution in film-making, but the era's biggest star was a blue-eyed dreamboat already closing in on middle age.
1980s TOM CRUISE
There is (alas) no serious competition. Nobody denies that Cruise has pizazz, but, unlike Grant, Gable or Hudson, his heroic pose is not in any way tempered by self-parodic irony. A brash star for a brash decade.
1990s BRAD PITT
You might plump for Johnny Depp. But Pitt has the edge when it comes to solid, old-fashioned matinee glamour. Happily, he has always seems to find himself slightly ridiculous.
2000s GEORGE CLOONEY
Well, maybe. Clooney certainly looks like a dreamboat. He is charming. He radiates wit. It's just a shame that – the Oceans flicks aside – nobody goes to see his movies.
