The movie role that made Bradley Cooper “increasingly terrified every day”
Recent history has made it abundantly clear that if there’s one thing that terrifies Bradley Cooper more than anything else ever will, it’s the possibility of the actor and filmmaker ending his career without at least one Academy Award to call his very own.
After Maestro walked away from the Oscars empty-handed despite earning seven nominations, it edged him ever closer to an unwanted record. Cooper has now been shortlisted 12 times across five different categories and continues his track record of being his generation’s ultimate nearly man.
That being said, the two features he’s directed to date have both found themselves in the running for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Actor’, and ‘Best Screenplay’, so his time may yet come. One thing working in his favour is that all of those nods came in an 11-year span, and because he’s an actor, writer, producer, and director, he’s got a better spread to avoid the ignominy of making history.
For comparison, there aren’t too many names ahead of him when it comes to racking up Oscar nominations without any wins. Composers Thomas Newman and Alex North notched 15 apiece, and sound mixer Greg P Russell has 16, but if re-recording engineer Kevin O’Connell can finally win at the 19th attempt, then all hope is far from lost.
One of his many unsuccessful ventures came with Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, which was realistically never in with a shot at landing ‘Best Picture’. It’s a wonderfully dark, dingy, dangerous, and deceitful film, though, even if snagging the big one was out of reach.
Cooper’s Stanton Carlisle undergoes a drastic transformation from suave and charming conman to a withered wreck of a human being, and while he’s the lead and focal point of the story, del Toro needed an equally powerful star to play opposite him. Naturally, when he was seeking his very own Godzilla, Cate Blanchett was the only place he was willing to turn.
Their scenes together were every bit as engaging as audiences would expect from two talents of their calibre, with producer J Miles Dale just as captivated on set. “That was like an acting masterclass,” he told A.Frame. “I felt like we could have sold tickets to the crew.”
The general framework of their sequences was in place, but thanks to del Toro’s habit of discarding his initial pages and encouraging Cooper and Blanchett to think on their feet and add some improvisational flourishes into the mix, the former grew ever more daunted by the fluidity of Nightmare Alley.
“You have to be able to go to those places that are sometimes a little scary,” Dale explained. “And Bradley will tell you, he was increasingly terrified every day at the prospect of what we were doing. He came out of it having run a bit of a marathon. But it was great to watch these artists at the top of their field really push themselves without a net.”
There are plenty of actors with a deep-seated fear of working on the fly, but even if Cooper was one of those, it didn’t show in Nightmare Alley.
