Bradley Cooper has given exceptionally well movies that have performed magnificently on the box office and have made people love the actor to great heights. But recently the actor revealed in an interview that he had other plans on his career and might have considered giving up acting but his recent role in the movie Licorice Pizza made him change his mind.
Despite having other arrangements and plans for his acting career, the actor told Mahershala Ali in a recent interview for Variety’s Actors on Actors series that he would have done “everything” to feature in Licorice Pizza.
“The reason that I didn’t give up acting is Paul Thomas Anderson,” said Cooper, 47. “When he called me to maybe be in his movie, Mahershala, I mean really, 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,” he recalled, “but I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m not doing it.’ ”
Cooper plays film producer Jon Peters in Licorice Pizza, which was “the first movie back from COVID,” according to Cooper. Peters was in a real-life romance with Barbra Streisand for nearly a decade.
“Jon Peters was the beginning of the movie, so I started with everybody else, which was wonderful, rather than coming in when everybody’s already downriver,” Cooper told his The Place Beyond the Pines costar, Ali.
Anderson, 51, wrote, produced, and directed the picture, which also stars Alana Haim, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper, who is making his big-screen debut.
“I watched all the camera tests. [Paul] was teaching me all about lenses, things I never knew,” Cooper, who earned praise for directing” A Star Is Born, shared. “He’s incredible.”
In regards to Nightmare Alley, which is now in cinemas, Cooper told Ali that the psychological thriller directed by Guillermo del Toro “was an interesting illustration of how uncomfortable I am” as an actor.
“I recall thinking to myself, ‘Oh wow, the men who didn’t employ me want to hire me?'” Cooper remarked. “‘Of course, I have to do it since I’ve never been permitted into that group,’ I thought. It was a combination of insecurity and ego.”
“Fortunately, it turned out to be an amazing experience,” he continued. “And it was fascinating for me to play Stanton Carlisle, a man who has clearly been damaged as a child, who has no parental base, no foundation for love, intimacy, or true connection, and who is surviving only on satisfaction and a frantic drive to discover who he is.”