How Bradley Cooper took over Hollywood: from addiction and self-loathing to nine Oscar nods

Bradley Cooper wasn’t the obvious choice to play the West Side Story composer Leonard Bernstein. The A Star Is Born actor and filmmaker, who was once voted the “sexiest man alive”, isn’t Jewish. Nor is he known to be bisexual. Fans remember him starring alongside a tiger in Todd Phillips’s booze-fuelled frat boy movie The Hangover (2009), or as a troubled but heroic soldier in Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014). Then there was his turn as the bipolar ex-schoolteacher in Silver Linings Playbook (2012), and voicing scrappy hero Rocket Raccoon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. None quite as refined as Bernstein. Yet next week, his biopic of the composer – titled Maestro – premieres at the London Film Festival. And he’s managed to prove the doubters wrong.

In the weeks leading up to the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, Cooper was caught up in an unholy row about the prosthetic nose he wore to play Bernstein. US-based organisation StopAntiSemitism expressed outrage at the make-up, calling his casting as the composer “sickening”. He was even accused of “stealing” the role from half-Jewish actor Jake Gyllenhaal, who had been trying to mount a rival biopic.

This, though, turned out to be one of those manufactured controversies that collapsed as soon as anyone actually watched the movie. Bernstein’s children defended Cooper vigorously, pointing out that their father indeed had “a nice, big nose”. The make-up artist, Kazu Hiro, was apologetic about “hurting people’s feelings” and insisted he had only been trying to portray Bernstein as “authentically as possible”.

As for Cooper’s performance, anyone expecting a grotesque piece of pantomime hamming – akin to Alec Guinness’s notorious portrayal of the grotesque and villainous Fagin in David Lean’s Oliver Twist (1948) – would have been disappointed. Cooper plays Bernstein as a man of extraordinary grace, elegance and brilliance. He’s a flawed figure – vain, ambitious, and unfaithful to his long-suffering South American wife Felicia (Carey Mulligan) – but he is also very lovable. It’s easy to understand why so many people, from the audiences in the concert halls to his young music students and the millions of viewers who watched his shows on TV, succumbed to his charm.

There is a graciousness to the way Cooper approaches Maestro. He is the director and star of the film, but he doesn’t hog the close-ups. The film is as much about Felicia as it is about Bernstein. In movement, temperament and behaviour, the composer is a very long way removed from the darker characters in Cooper’s screen career. There always seems to be a smile on the edge of his mouth. He is gentle and funny.

These qualities are reportedly shared by the actor himself. Those who worked with him in his early years talk about his humility and professionalism, as well as his magnetic appeal on camera. The Welsh director Marc Evans recruited a pre-fame Cooper in 2001 for his grungy horror film My Little Eye. He cast him as a handsome, strapping “intruder” who arrives in a house in which five young strangers are staying for a Big Brother-style TV series. He quickly seduces one of the women.

“Somebody just said, you should look at this young actor called Bradley Cooper,” Evans tells me. “[They said] ‘He hasn’t done that much but he is brilliant.’ He flew in. It was like lobbing a grenade in. Both in terms of the story and because of his energy, he disrupted the slightly claustrophobic atmosphere of a very tight cast. He had this amazing charisma.”

The director appreciated Cooper’s lack of vanity. Part of the film was shot under the radar and without proper permits in Nova Scotia in the dead of winter. “He was completely game,” Evans recalls. “He had a great sense of humour. He was very amenable and really up for it. I’ve got very happy memories of working with him... it is no surprise in the least that he has done so well subsequently – and I take no credit for it whatsoever.”

Native American filmmaker and actor Georgina Lightning directed Cooper in another of his early roles, the indie Older Than America (2008). Set on a Minnesota Indian reservation, Lightning’s film is a dark drama with supernatural elements. It touches on suicide, oppression, and the bitter legacy of forced assimilation, with Cooper playing a geologist shocked by what he discovers about Native American genocide.

“He was humble and kind and really [made] a positive contribution,” Lightning tells me of the actor. By the time he made the film, Cooper had already racked up some significant credits (the 2005 comedy Wedding Crashers among them). He wasn’t yet a “blockbuster” star, as Lightning puts it, but was already signed to one of the top Hollywood talent agencies and was on a fast upward trajectory. Older Than America wasn’t an obvious choice to boost his career – it was bleak, and low-budget, and the product of a first-time director. Nonetheless, the actor threw himself into the project with typical gusto.

“I have no idea of his education around our culture,” Lightning remembers. “He said he was excited he was going to be able to work around the indigenous cast.” Cooper was appearing alongside Wes Studi and Adam Beach, two of Hollywood’s most renowned Native American actors. “Brad made it so easy,” she continues. “He did a lot of improv and he brought so much to the table. A lot of indigenous actors that are not trained cannot do improv. He was just incredible to work with because he could improv anything.”

Cooper studied at the Actors Studio in New York, the home of Lee Strasberg and the origins of Method acting. You can find revealing footage online of a fresh-faced Cooper attending an Inside the Actors Studio masterclass given by his idol, Robert De Niro. From the audience, he asks a very earnest question about De Niro’s research for his role as a patient emerging from a coma in Awakenings (1990). Even De Niro is a little startled by Cooper’s intensity. The young thespian had an obsessive personality. After seeing Daniel Day-Lewis in a New York coffee bar, Cooper would sit – time after time – in the same seat and cup his drink with two hands, exactly as Day-Lewis had done. It was as if he hoped some of the British actor’s magic would rub off on him.

Starting out in Hollywood around the new millennium, Cooper was good-looking, talented and intelligent. But he was also strangely insecure, and has talked of “feeling invisible and not good enough”. In probably his most revealing interview, given to his close friend, actor and comedian Dax Shepard, in a 2021 podcast, he acknowledged the anxiety and low esteem that dogged him in those early years.

JJ Abrams had cast Cooper as a news reporter in his 2001 espionage series Alias, but rather than seeing the show as a career breakthrough, Cooper agonised over the public’s mixed response to his character. He would use his dial-up modem to go online and read negative comments about himself written on message boards – he’d call this “a narcissistic, self-loathing endeavour”. Eventually, he went to Abrams and asked to be written out of the show.

Cooper, then, wasn’t an overnight success. He had problems with alcohol and drugs. “I was so lost and addicted to cocaine,” he told Shepard’s podcast. “I realised I wasn’t going to live up to my potential, and that scared the hell out of me. I thought, ‘Wow, I’m actually gonna ruin my life; I’m really gonna ruin it.”

Sometimes, in those dark days, Cooper could turn very violent. “Definitely, the last year before I got sober... I had so much self-loathing, and wanted to be a man so desperately, and what better way than to hurt somebody physically,” he said.

It took the actor until his late twenties to clean up. He was 34 when he was catapulted to stardom by The Hangover, which is relatively late for Hollywood. “That definitely was a changing point, where I felt, this is what fame is like,” he told Shepard. At the time, he lived in the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Venice, in a house that opened onto the street. He was startled that passers-by had begun to recognise him. Everyone seemed to love him. Even so, the negative comments stayed in his mind. And he strongly rejected any idea that he was a sex symbol. As he confided to Shepard, “I don’t think I ever let that in... I definitely had facts to back up my rejection of that notion [that he was a heartthrob]. [Early] feedback I got on this movie was ‘He’s not f***able.’ That was like... holy s***, that’s a rough thing to hear.”

The roles Cooper landed tended not to be conventional male romantic leads. “I wasn’t cast as the hot guy,” he remembered. “I was the sidekick in Alias and the a**hole in Wedding Crashers.” Cooper tried to dismiss the idea that he was a heartthrob. When he was voted “Sexiest Man Alive” by People magazine in 2011, he thought it was a prank. After the award was announced, there were protests that Ryan Gosling should have got it instead.

But without those insecurities, Cooper wouldn’t have developed into such an interesting actor. He can turn his hand to anything. He’s a brilliant tennis player, a talented musician (he won two Grammys, for Best Soundtrack and Best Pop Duo Performance, for A Star Is Born), and an accomplished chef. A producer, too, he’s earned nine Oscar nominations in less than a decade, five of them for behind-the-scenes work – his role as a producer on Joker, A Star Is Born, American Sniper and Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley (2021) meant he was nominated as part of their respective Best Picture nods, while he received a Best Adapted Screenplay nod for A Star Is Born, too (his acting nominations were for that film, along with Silver Linings Playbook, American Sniper and David O Russell’s 2013 crime caper American Hustle).

Despite all of that, he still seems to have imposter syndrome. In his best roles, there are always elements of doubt and self-questioning. He’s as likely to play underdogs as he is alpha males. Witness him as the scheming and duplicitous, yet still strangely sympathetic, drifter in Nightmare Alley. Or as the middle-aged man living with his parents in Silver Linings Playbook.

As a filmmaker, Cooper is far more interested in character than narrative. He’s an actor’s director who knows just what is needed to build up a rounded, psychologically rich performance on screen. Maestro is far from tautly plotted. It’s as much a Scenes from a Marriage-style drama about the ups and downs of a relationship as it is a biopic of a great artist. Nonetheless, the film is very inventively shot. He spent years preparing the project. It has many moments that stick in the mind: the look of ecstasy on Bernstein’s face as he conducts a big orchestra; how he resembles a naughty child when Felicia (the magnificent Mulligan) catches him with his male lover; the extraordinary pathos of the scenes showing him as a very old man close to death.

In interviews, Cooper is generally very guarded. When The New York Times spoke to him for A Star Is Born, he stonewalled, refusing to answer any questions he regarded as too personal or intrusive. “If you really want to know him, you can’t sit with him and ask him,” wrote interviewer and author Taffy Brodesser-Akner. “You have to watch his movie. You have to feel it. You have to be willing to accept answers that are spiritual and not literal.”

Even as he parries inquiries about his private life, Cooper is always ready to discuss the work. “It was almost like Leonard Bernstein, at different ages, was directing the film,” he claimed recently of Maestro, suggesting he had somehow become possessed by the man whose story he was telling. It’s the kind of preposterous remark that his old comedian friends – Shepard, his Hangover co-stars Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis – would simply never have let him get away with. But if Cooper does take himself too seriously, he’s probably earned the right to do so.

“You can’t skate on your looks alone,” Galifianakis used to tell him. It’s a testament to how far Cooper has come that he is now talked about as an artist as much as one of Hollywood’s “hottest” if most reluctant “hunks”.

‘Maestro’ screens at the BFI London Film Festival on 9, 10 and 14 October, arrives in select UK cinemas on 24 November, and streams on Netflix from 20 December