“It wound up not coming together”: Bradley Cooper’s last audition was for a movie that never got made
You don’t have to meet Bradley Cooper to know that the guy is a perfectionist.
Over the past 30 years, he has completely dedicated himself to film, something you can see it in his televised questions as a student to Robert De Niro and Sean Penn, the fact that he wrote, produced, directed and starred in a niche movie about a conductor that took him six years to immerse himself in, and the fact that he trained in a Michelin-starred kitchen for months just to play a chef in a film nobody remembers.
In just over 15 years, Cooper has gone from the ridiculously handsome straight guy getting repeatedly annoyed by Zach Galifiniakis in The Hangover to an Oscars favourite with 12 nominations to his name and an astonishing $13billion in total box office revenue, while becoming a filmmaker so obsessed with detail that on his latest film, he even took on the role of camera operator.
That was for the John Bishop-inspired comedy Is This Thing On from last year, a movie starring Cooper’s long-term best friend Will Arnett, which he wrote, produced and directed, but didn’t take the lead in, not that it stopped him from appearing on camera in a reduced role. It didn’t get the attention that Cooper’s other directing projects have, big-budget movies like the Lady Gaga-starring A Star is Born or 2023’s Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro, but it brought him plenty of acclaim nonetheless.
One fellow director who did get plenty of awards season attention and glory this year, though, was Paul Thomas Anderson, and it is he that Cooper credits with saving him from retiring from acting altogether when he was cast in PTA’s 2021 film Licorice Pizza. Anderson also had a big effect on Cooper’s directing, thanks to time spent on the film, during which the Magnolia and Boogie Nights legend taught him about certain lenses.
But the actor-director has a history of threatening to pack projects in; as far back as 2013, he was ready to walk off the set of the film The Place Beyond the Pines after the director Derek Cianfrance brought in a new writer to complete redraft the script, leading Cooper to leave him a voicemail saying, “Bro, I just want to let you know I read the new draft and I’m out”.
The situation was only saved by Cianfrance flying to Canada to meet Cooper and convince him to see the film out, but that showed that even in the early days of his success, he had a high value of his worth. The previous year, he was still having to audition for parts, despite the worldwide success of The Hangover franchise, and Cooper duly played the game for a movie that eventually was scrapped.
He told Variety, “Last time I auditioned was Paradise Lost. I put myself on tape with my buddy Wes to play Satan, and we were going to do it. This was 2012, I think. And I got the role. I was so happy. It wound up not coming together. Just recently, I thought maybe after Maestro I’d want to try to write and direct a version of Paradise Lost. Adapted from Milton’s poem.”
An epic poem spanning ten books from the 1600s, written by British poet John Milton, Paradise Lost is a biblical tale concerning the temptation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Long considered unfilmable, the adaptation with Cooper was in development for some time, to the point where even the use of motion capture and 3D was discussed; however, the budget began to spiral, and the project was scrapped. Cooper is now reportedly in talks to do his write-direct-produce-star thing in an Ocean’s Eleven prequel set in the 1960s, co-starring Margot Robbie; let’s hope he sees this through.
