Bradley Cooper Naked for 'Six Hours' to Film Full-Frontal Scene
Bradley Cooper is baring it all about baring it all in "Nightmare Alley" in a podcast with The Hollywood Reporter editor-at-large Kim Masters.
Referring to his full-frontal nude scene, the "big deal" Cooper says he remembers reading the script of the Guillermo Del Toro-directed thriller and thinking: "He's a pickled punk in that bathtub and it's to story. You have to do it."
And do it he did, indeed. It was reportedly Toni Collette's "first day" of filming and Cooper was required to be naked in front of her and the crew for "six hours."
"It was just like, 'Whoa.' It was pretty heavy," said Cooper, an eight-time Academy Award nominee. But, as he told Masters in the podcast, he wasn't fazed.
"The content 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," said Cooper.
"Nightmare Alley," set in the 1940s, is based on William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel of the same name. The film follows Carlisle, an ambitious carny-turned-mentalist who begins a journey to becoming a master manipulator.
"It was important to go there, unflinchingly and boldly, which I was able to do with Guillermo hand-in-hand," said Cooper. "It cost something for us emotionally, making this movie. It was very risky to go to these places of, 'Are we this person? Is this a side of ourselves? Is this who we really are?' "
Cooper continued, "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."
Have you seen "Nightmare Alley"?