By David Raether
Remember that guy in your high school who was impossibly handsome and good at everything and who you just always wished would at least acknowledge you with a smile in the hall? You know the guy. He was All-Conference as a wide receiver on the football team, one of the leads in the musical, and starting center fielder on the baseball team. Yeah, that guy.
So, that’s pretty much Bradley Cooper. Except that guy in your high school probably never amounted to much because good looks and charm will only take you so far. Believe me, Hollywood is littered with good-looking, charming men who never amount to anything much. In fact, life is littered with them. But combine good looks and charm with considerable talent, intelligence, drive, and good taste, and you would have what is already the legendary career of Bradley Cooper. He has been in a surprisingly large number of outstanding TV shows, movies, and plays. And he shows no sign of slowing down what has already been a prodigious output.
Bradley Cooper just burns with the ambition to do well in good projects. He is one of those who had a running head start on life and never slowed down. In fact, he probably pushed himself even harder.
The product of an upper-middle-class family, Bradley Charles Cooper was born on January 5, 1975, in Allen Township, a pretty little town in the Lehigh Valley about an hour and a half outside Philadelphia. His mom worked for the local NBC affiliate, and his dad was a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. As a kid, he liked playing basketball and cooking for his friends and developed an early interest in theater.
Cooper attended Germantown Academy, a highly-regarded prep school in suburban Philadelphia, and then started his college career at Villanova University in Philadelphia. He eventually transferred to Georgetown and completed his degree with a major in English and a minor in French. He is fluent in French and spent six months living in Aix-en-Provence, France, as an exchange student. He was also on the crew team at Georgetown and very active in theater.
After graduating, Cooper auditioned for a graduate program in acting at the Actors Studio Drama School in Manhattan and was selected by James Lipton for the program. (If you’ve never seen the interview show Inside the Actors Studio, it consists of Lipton interviewing a single actor about their career and philosophies of acting. Will Ferrell memorably spoofed it many times.)
Anyway, the school was a springboard for Cooper into Hollywood. In 2001, he appeared in his first feature, Wet Hot American Summer. If this sounds like a really stupid movie, you’re right! That was the idea. It is a very amusing goof on summer camp movies. But more on that later.
In the five ensuing years, Cooper had a recurring role on the spy thriller TV series Alias, which starred Jennifer Garner. Apparently, if you were a high school girl in those years, Alias was required viewing. Since I was neither a girl nor in high school in those years, I missed most of this series, but my daughters and their friends and their friends’ friends raved about it. If you were driving a carload of girls to a high school volleyball game, you were able to pretty much keep up with the series by listening to them talk about it. I could probably win an Alias trivia contest without having ever seen more than half an episode.
Cooper’s breakthrough film role was Sack Lodge, the arrogant, preppy jerk in Wedding Crashers. Over the next several years, Cooper appeared in a number of TV shows, films, and Broadway shows. His next big film role came in 2009 with The Hangover. He played Phil Wenneck, the frat boy/middle school teacher who leads his friends on a hilarious, drunken bachelor party weekend in Las Vegas. For such a broad comedy, Cooper’s performance was surprisingly nuanced.
The Hangover led to steady film work for Cooper, leading up to his remarkable performance in David O. Russell’s very moving and very funny Silver Linings Playbook. Cooper later worked again with Russell in the critically-acclaimed American Hustle.
Cooper’s depth of acting talent was in full blossom during these years. His performance as US Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle was the closest any American actor has come to Gary Cooper in decades—a muted and deeply soulful rendition of a tragic life.
Cooper’s first directorial effort was the enormously successful A Star Is Born. Co-starring with Lady Gaga, Cooper brought a fresh take on a film and a story that had already been made/remade three times previously. This was one of those “okay, fine I’ll go see it with you” movies you go to with your wife because she insists on it, but you really don’t want to go… and then find yourself a blubbering, sobbing mess at the end. At least, in my experience.
Cooper continues to do good and even great work, sometimes in films that are successful and sometimes in films that are not. It’s a courageous and ambitious course he has set for himself.
But it only looks easy. Cooper has admitted to struggling with substance abuse and pondering suicide in the early years of his career. He has also spoken in recent years about how chaotic and unpleasant he was during that time. He remains close with his family, especially his widowed mother, who was his regular date for a number of award shows. On the unimportant side, he was named People Weekly’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2011. And he could probably win it again these days.
Cooper is almost 50 now and has built an impressive body of work that only continues to grow. And it just feels like some of his best work lies ahead of him.
Here are six of my favorite Bradley Cooper movies.
This was a total bomb. Critics hated it, and it was a box office bust. And yet, when it showed up on cable a year or so after its initial release, it turned into a cult classic. This was Cooper’s first feature film. It is bad and ridiculous… and that was the point! Apparently, what nobody noticed when it was in the theaters is that this movie is a goof on summer camp movies. It’s over-the-top and campy. By intent.
It’s set in 1981 in a fictional summer camp called Camp Firewood (the camp's name should have been everyone’s first clue that this was a spoof). Cooper plays the assistant director of the camp’s season-ending camper talent show. And he takes his job a little too seriously—in the best possible way.
The amazing ensemble cast includes Janeane Garofalo, Amy Poehler, David Hyde Pierce, Molly Shannon, and Elizabeth Banks. This is a really fun movie, even if you’ve already seen it several times. Plus, it eventually led to a 2015 Netflix prequel limited series that is equally absurd, with the majority of the cast returning to play younger versions of themselves, despite being older.
This served as Cooper’s breakthrough movie, and it’s truly one of the best Hollywood comedies of the current century. Cooper plays a heedless and irresponsible middle school teacher who goes on a bachelor party weekend to Las Vegas with three friends (Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis. The group wakes up the morning after to discover that the groom (Justin Bartha) has gone missing… and also, there’s a tiger in the bathroom and a baby in one of the closets. And we’re off to the races.
Look, you’ve probably already seen this movie a few times. I’m telling you, it doesn’t get old; it just gets funnier. Ken Jeong has an absolutely hilarious cameo as a naked and ill-tempered gangster.
Cooper’s performance here is interesting: he doesn’t play things for a laugh, instead leaving it up to Galifianakis and Helms. Cooper plays things straight, and his character comes across as almost amoral (especially when he casually steals field trip money from his students to use for a gambling stake in Vegas.) When you watch the movie this time, pay attention to his performance. It’s quite subtle. There’s never a bad time to enjoy this film.
This is a fascinating and largely overlooked film from Derek Cianfrance that sequentially tells three complete and largely separate stories. Cooper is a central figure in all three stories, all of which center around crime, fathers, and sons. Ryan Gosling plays a bank robber Cooper kills at the end of a chase. Cooper is hailed as a hero, but is he really? Things get even more ambiguous when the stolen money is found, and Cooper wants to give it to the robber’s widow, much to the consternation of his fellow cops who found the money with him. The movie is a gritty and masterful crime story covering nearly two decades.
This was really the first time Cooper demonstrated his serious acting chops, and he was more than up to the task. Gosling is also magnificent. The excellent cast also includes the likes of Eva Mendes, Rose Byrne (always one of my favorites), and Ray Liotta. This is a movie you probably never heard of but really should give a try. Consider this my full endorsement.
David O. Russell’s funny, romantic, and utterly moving tale of coming to grips with mental illness and moving on with your life after a tragedy. Actually, this may very well be the best American film ever made about mental illness and the toll it takes on individuals and their families.
Cooper plays the troubled son of a small-time Philadelphia bookie (Robert DeNiro) who has returned home after a lengthy hospitalization following a mental breakdown. He isn’t quite back to “normal.” He later meets a troubled woman (Jennifer Lawrence) struggling to deal with the violent death of her husband. And then, the two take up competitive ballroom dancing.
This is an involving and compassionate film about mental illness, falling in love, and the Philadelphia Eagles. Outstanding and vulnerable performances by both Cooper and Lawrence make this an unforgettable film that is worth watching over and over. Plus, Chris Tucker is fantastic, but not in the way you expect him to be. The final scene never fails to make me cry. This is truly one of those movies that will remind you why you like movies in the first place.
A spectacular—and yet subtle—film about the greatest sniper in American history. Cooper gives a brilliant performance as Chris Kyle, a man who simply cannot give up war and keeps returning to Iraq over and over.
One of the best war pictures of recent years, this film gives an unflinching portrayal of the perils and horrors of the long war our country fought for decades after 9/11. The final urban battle sequence as a sandstorm approaches is one of the best war sequences ever put on film—right up there with Spielberg’s opening sequence of the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan. And here’s something to ponder: Clint Eastwood directed this picture when he was robust 84 years old.
Since this is the third remake of the original movie of the same name, a bit of history is in order. This particular version bears the closest resemblance to the last one—the 1976 version that starred Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. The original was in 1937, starred Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, and boasted a screenplay by Dorothy Parker. It’s a cracking good movie, with music by the great Max Steiner. The film was remade as a musical (sort of) in 1954 starring Judy Garland and James Mason, directed by George Cukor, and written by Moss Hart.
All three of these movies drew in some of the biggest talent in the history of Hollywood. So, that said, it certainly took more than a bit of chutzpah by Cooper to decide to make a new version—and then direct it himself! But he was right to do it.
This is the best version of the story, and I don’t believe I’m suffering from recency bias here. The story feels real, the acting is tremendous, and, well, Lady Gaga is quite a singer and performer. Cooper plays the role of Jackson Maine, a celebrated but dissolute singer/songwriter. Lady Gaga plays a singer he discovers in a drag club doing a salute to Edith Piaf. He becomes her mentor, then her husband, but his life completely falls apart as her career soars.
The storyline sounds pretty hackneyed, doesn’t it? The movie, however, is intensely real and tragic. The reason? Powerful performances by both Cooper and Lady Gaga. This is a film worth seeing again and again. (And while you’re at it, check out the other versions of this movie as well!)
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.