Bradley Cooper’s much buzzed-about role in “Nightmare Alley” turned out to be a nightmare to shoot.
The eight-time Academy Award-nominated heartthrob revealed that in order to film the short nude scene in the new Guillermo del Toro-directed psychological thriller, he was required to be in the buff in front of the crew for six whole hours.
“It was just like, ‘Whoa.’ It was pretty heavy,” he shared about the experience.
“I remember reading in the script and thinking, ‘He’s a pickled punk in that bathtub and it’s [true] to story. You have to do it,’" he said referring to his character, Stanton Carlisle, while talking to The Hollywood Reporter editor-at-large Kim Masters on her KCRW podcast “The Business.”
The caveat, however, since the scene was being filmed during Toni Collette’s “first day” of filming, Cooper was required to be nude “in front of the crew for six hours.”
The 47-year-old actor and budding director said the nudity requirement in the script didn’t bother him “because there was nothing gratuitous about it.”
“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,” he furthered.
Directed and co-written by the two-time Oscar Award winning filmmaker behind “The Shape of Water,” the National Board of Review-winning drama also stars Care Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins and Rooney Mara.
Based on William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel of the same name, “Nightmare Alley” follows the wild ride of a house-burning Midwesterner who becomes an ambitious carnival barker with a talent for manipulating people with a few well-chosen words. In the big city, the charismatic swindler hooks up with a wealthy female psychiatrist who proves to be even more dangerous.
———
