“There’s no way I’m not doing it”: the 2021 movie that stopped Bradley Cooper from quitting acting
Before he stepped behind the camera himself, Bradley Cooper worked with some of the finest directors of all time.
David O Russell coached him to his first Oscar nomination in Silver Linings Playbook, which was shortly followed by the controversial Clint Eastwood project, American Sniper, alongside which he also worked with James Gunn on the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, Todd Phillips on The Hangover series, and also had a role in JJ Abrams’ spy thriller Alias.
In 2021, he teamed up with another noted auteur, albeit in the very minor role of John Peters, a flamboyant real-life celebrity hairdresser dating Barbra Streisand, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s coming-of-age drama, Licorice Pizza.
He comes into contact with the film’s lead characters, Alana and Gary, when they deliver a waterbed to his house. After he is rude to them, the two youngsters take revenge by flooding their house, leading to what would have been an epic car chase had the movie not been set during the 1973 oil crisis.
Speaking to his The Place Beyond the Pines co-star, Mahershala Ali, as part of Variety’s ‘Actors on Actors’ series, Cooper revealed how he came to appear in Licorice Pizza. He was working on Guillermo del Toro’s remake of Nightmare Alley when he got the call from PTA, and even though he was already pretty busy, he simply couldn’t turn this opportunity down.
“The reason that I didn’t give up acting is Paul Thomas Anderson,” he revealed, “I think I’d open up a door in his movie. I’d do anything. We broke from Nightmare Alley, I was able to grow a beard, and Searchlight was praying that I didn’t get Covid, because we had to go back and continue Nightmare Alley, but I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m not doing it’.”
A long-term admirer of PTA’s work, Cooper was lucky to be admitted into the close-knit world of Licorice Pizza. The film, which chronicles the relationship between a wayward young woman and an aspiring teenage actor, was very much a family affair, wherein Anderson based the character of Gary on his friend Gary Goetzman, a former child star.
Cooper Hoffman is the son of the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, who has now appeared in a number of Anderson’s films, and PTA has worked with the Haim sisters on a number of their music videos; moreover, the film also features a cameo from his partner, Maya Rudolph, and their four children.
Licorice Pizza was nominated three times at the Oscars, including in the same ‘Best Picture’ category as Nightmare Alley. Alas, it’s not one of Anderson’s best works, falling somewhere in the middle of the pack. None of this will matter one iota to Cooper, of course, as he said, he would do literally anything for Paul Thomas Anderson, so this must have been a dream come true. Hopefully, we can get a more involved collaboration from these two at some point in the not-too-distant future.
