Bradley Cooper inNightmare Alley.Photo: Kerry Hayes/20th Century Studios
Bradley Cooperis opening up about stripping down.
TheNightmare Alleyactor has a full-frontal scene in the newGuillermo del Toro-directed psychological thriller, and recently chatted withThe Hollywood Reportereditor-at-large Kim Masters about doing the “big deal” scene on her KCRW podcastThe Business.
“I remember reading in the script and thinking, ‘He’s a pickled punk in that bathtub and it’s to story. You have to do it,’ " Cooper, 47, told Masters of his character, Stanton Carlisle.
The scene went down duringToni Collette’s “first day” of filming — and Cooper was required to be nude “in front of the crew for six hours.”
“It was just like, ‘Whoa.’ It was pretty heavy,” said the eight-timeAcademy Awardnominee.
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Bradley Cooper and Toni Collette inNightmare Alley.Kerry Hayes/20th Century Studios
Set in the 1940s, the dark and twisted plot ofNightmare Alley, based on William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel of the same name, follows the wild ride of Carlisle, an ambitious carny-turned-mentalist who discovers a knack for sleight of hand and showmanship and begins a journey into a bigger city as a master manipulator.
“Thecontent of what the movie is, what we were exploring, in order to do it in a real way, it demanded that we’d be naked emotionally and soulfully,” he also said.
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Cooper previously toldDeadlinethat hisNightmare Alleyrole (which marks his first completely nude scene) “terrified me, for many reasons.”
“But as we started to delve into it — and we had the real benefit of time and prep to work on this — the idea of inhabiting somebody who doesn’t know who they are, and who’s in search of who they are through the whole film, right up until the last scene,” he explained. “I thought, ‘Maybe that’s where I am in my life as an actor and a human being.’ "
Cooper continued, “It wasimportant to go there, unflinchingly and boldly, which I was able to do with Guillermo hand-in-hand. It cost something for us emotionally, making this movie. It was very risky to go to these places of, ‘Arewethis person? Is this a side of ourselves? Is this who we really are?’ "
“I found that to be quite vulnerable as an actor,” he added. “All my characters tend to linger, but this one, I have to say, was an especially hard one.”
Nightmare Alleyis in theaters now.
source: people.com
