The Hangoverhas hit the jackpot in the US and has made Bradley Cooper a star. DONALD CLARKE wants to hate him but finds the A-list newcomer is handsome, clever and (sigh!) nice
I SUPPOSE Bradley Cooper has some Irish in him. Does he? “Oh yeah,” the genial, annoyingly good-looking actor says. “I have a lot of Irish in me. One of my grandfathers is from Cork and the other is from Galway. I’m Irish right down the middle.” If you say so.
Cooper, star of this week's gut-busting The Hangover, is handsome in a way that only Americans are handsome. Think Matthew McConaughey or that bloke out of Lostwhose hair is always wet. Though raised in smoky Philadelphia, Bradley has the looks of a man who is always scanning the horizon for the nearest beach. You just don't find these sorts of men east of Martha's Vineyard.
He's probably an idiot, though. He probably takes Dan Brown seriously and thinks Herman Melville was a character in The Munsters. Oh no. What's this? He studied English at Georgetown University and went to graduate school at the Actors Studio.
Okay, he's no moron. But, until recently, bitter old jerks like me could console themselves with the knowledge that Cooper had never quite registered with audiences. Sure, he was in The Wedding Crashersand had a regular role opposite Jennifer Garner in the TV series Alias. He had not, however, occupied the foreground of a genuine, break-out-the-Möet blockbuster.
All that changed last week when The Hangovertook $43 million (€39m) on its opening weekend at the US box office. "About 20 million more than they expected," he laughs. "You just never know with these things. The atmosphere on set was great. But you never quite know."
The Hangoverfinds its four bleary heroes trying to work out what they got up to on a stag night in Las Vegas. When they wake up after their revels, they find their suite in a state of spectacular disorder. There's a tiger in one room and a baby in the other. One of the guys has lost a tooth. Another appears to have spent time in hospital. Their memories are wiped.
“I got the short straw with the tiger,” Bradley laughs. “I was the one who had to feed him.” Hang on. Those scenes weren’t computer-generated? “No. I think it’s still less expensive to do it this way. They sit one trainer on one side of the tiger and another on the other side and then I have to feed him with chicken blood from a baby’s bottle. I mean you can’t really train a tiger. You kind of have to work around what the tiger wants to do.”
The Hangoverhas already been classified as the latest film in the "bromance" genre of comedy. That is to say, like I Love You, Manor Superbad, it focuses on the close relationship between supposedly heterosexual males and has less to do with romance between gentlemen and ladies. Bradley furrows his unnecessarily tanned brow at this suggestion.
“I think that does refer more to the Judd Apatow sort of comedy,” he says. “This is slightly different. Here, the guys are essentially in a war situation. They are under that kind of pressure. The relationships become that bit closer because it’s as if they are in a war scenario.”
The cast were billeted in Vegas for a month and a half during the production. I imagine there was plenty of time for high jinks in that period. Did they roll out the barrel and have a barrel of fun? Was beer swilled? “Those days are over for me,” he says, implying the existence of a fatal flaw in his otherwise shimmering persona. “I hit a great many bottoms when I was younger. I don’t know if I’ve said this before in interview, but I was a major-league alcoholic for a while. Eventually, I realised I had to bottom out and stop drinking.”
Divorced from actress Jennifer Esposito in 2007, after just four months of marriage, Bradley now spends his spare hours running in the hills, playing with his dogs and avoiding questions about alleged dates with Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz.
Those personal problems aside, Cooper, now 34, has encountered relatively few speed-bumps on his slow but steady progress to the A-list. After leaving the Actors' Studio in 2000, he almost immediately secured that supporting role in Alias.
“It’s funny, you know,” he says. “I moved to LA when I got the part in Alias and I immediately said to myself: ‘Oh no. I’ll have to wear hats when I go out. Everybody will recognise me.’ But, you know, nobody did and, of course, I was actually a little disappointed.”
He admits that he remains surprised that his biggest hits have turned out to be comedies. His pals have never regarded him as a particularly funny guy.
“At the same time, I always feel it’s a real privilege to be in something that made people laugh. You know, when I was starting out, I would do anything so long as I was allowed to act. Dell computer commercials, whatever. And I would do them willingly with no shame. I was happy just to work.”
Cooper continues to keep his acting muscles in shape by appearing in the odd play. In 2006, he starred alongside Julia Roberts in the Broadway production of Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain. The press attention was, of course, all focused on his superstar co-star.
“In a way, she bore the brunt and allowed us to focus on the acting with less pressure,” he says. “I had never done a play like that before – eight performances a week. The opening night was insane. It was just like the Golden Globe awards. Oprah was there and so on.”
Still, for all that furore, plays count as mere sideshows in the carnival that is contemporary celebrity. Three years later, Bradley is beginning to find himself the centre of attention in gossip rags and dubious internet forums which feature endless debates as to the extent of his undeniable dreaminess. I guess it must become tiresome, after a while.
“I don’t know,” he laughs. “I have seen those things. But the next post down is always ‘He’s the ugliest guy in the world’. I have decided now to stop reading anything about myself on the internet or anywhere else. This is the first film for which I have read none of the reviews.”
But the reviews have been really good. “Yeah? Looks like I picked the wrong film to stop reading, then.”
What happens in Vegas
The movies love to go to Vegas but you couldn't exactly say they love Vegas itself. Consider a list of "Top Ten Movies Filmed in Vegas" compiled by an organisation entitled Las Vegas Vacations.
The chart includes such films as The Godfather Part 2(two sets of hoodlums squabble over the city), Casino(more brawling gangsters), Bugsy(yet more), Leaving Las Vegas(a writer makes friends with a prostitute while drinking himself to death) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas(the city as a pharmaceutically heightened nightmare).
This list is, remember, compiled by an organisation that is actually trying to encourage readers to visit the city. Casinoalone acknowledges modern Vegas as a family-friendly destination, but the characters see this as a very bad thing.
"Today it looks like Disneyland," Robert De Niro moans.
The Hangoveris in cinemas now.
