We already know what the critics think about Bradley Cooper playing Leonardo Bernstein in Maestro, but what do the legendary conductor's own kids think about the actor's performance in the Golden Globe-nominated film?
Bernstein's daughter Jamie, a writer and broadcaster, penned an essay for TIME about what Maestro—which Cooper directed as well as starred in alongside Carey Mulligan, Matt Bomer, Sarah Silverman and Maya Hawke, the latter of whom portrays young Jamie onscreen—gets right about the real-life Lenny and his marriage to wife Felicia.
In the essay, Jamie revealed how she and her siblings, Nina and Alexander, have been taken with audience reactions at the "many screenings" they have attended since Maestro hit theaters on November 22. (The drama is now available to stream with a Netflix subscription.) In Jamie's words:
Over the past months, my brother, sister, and I have attended many screenings of Bradley Cooper’s film Maestro. In the receptions afterward, we repeatedly encountered this very same gesture: people coming up to us, hand over heart—to share the enormous emotions they had experienced while watching the film.
She commended Cooper's "enormous risk" in showing both the public side of Bernstein, as one of the world's most renowned composers and conductors, and his private side as a father and husband involved in "an unusual marriage":
Bradley Cooper took an enormous risk in showing a very public persona, Bernstein, in the context of his private life. He welcomes his viewers into a liminal space where the daily intensities and negotiations of a marriage are laid bare for all to see. It’s an unusual marriage, yes—and yet, it contains the elements of every marriage. That’s why viewers react the way they do; the specifics have been rendered somehow universal. Not every married couple has a Thanksgiving Day fight as a giant Snoopy balloon floats past the window—but every married person (and child of parents) recognizes that fight.
Jamie noted how the actor-director utilized her own memoir, 2018's Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein, in "his search for authenticity" for the role. Some details from her pages ended up in his film, including a scene where Cooper's Bernstein squashes rumors of his infidelity and bisexuality during a sit-down with his daughter, and another showing the "last real conversation" she had with her mother, portrayed in the film by Mulligan.
She also discusses having "the extraordinary Carey Mulligan" play the role of her mother, a woman was complicated in real life as well as the film. In her words:
Hearing the extraordinary Carey Mulligan say those words in the film allowed me to experience their power in a whole new way. Here was a woman who had known fury, regret, and love—and now, at the end, she was choosing love over all other emotions. Clearly, Bradley Cooper understood the magnitude of Felicia’s words—and he uses them to tell us that Felicia is forgiving Lenny: that she is loving him to her last breath, seeing his own true heart in all its anguish and complexity.
And Jamie praised Cooper's "hyper-focus and perfectionism" on the project, traits that she likened to her own father:
As Bradley worked on this enormous project, my brother, sister, and I gradually realized how much like our father he actually was. We recognized that intensity, that hyper-focus and perfectionism—but what resonated for us, more than anything, was the all-embracing warmth Bradley brought into every space, and to every person. That was the Lenny-est thing about him. Bradley’s hand was right over his own heart, throughout the making of Maestro. Nothing could have moved us more.
It's not the first time that one of Bernstein's children publicly spoke out in support of Cooper. After backlash hit due to the actor's heavy makeup transformation and controversial use of a prosthetic nose to portray the musical icon, the Bernstein siblings released an official statement backing Bradley and shutting down any "Jewface" claims.
Jamie previously told Vanity Fair that she and her brother and sister were shocked as "what they were able to achieve" with the makeup and prosthetics in the movie and joked that they frequently thought Cooper was simply sending them pictures of their dad and not of the actor himself.
It just made us gasp at what they were able to achieve. He would send us photographs on his phone, and some of them were so spot on that we would think, 'Oh, come on now, he just sneaked in a picture of our dad.'
Given how connected Jamie Bernstein and her siblings have been to the making of the movie, it's likely we'll see them on the red carpet alongside Cooper and Co. or hear shout-outs to the family during speeches as Maestro officially enters award season.
