Why Hollywood’s sexiest man is slumming it as a West End monster — just to prove he can act
ACCORDING to the people who monitor such details, Bradley Cooper earned £ 54 million last year, making him the best-paid actor in the world. Yet for the next two months, this astoundingly indulged film star is doing something markedly less lucrative — but I suspect more rewarding.
The star of The Hangover (a gloriously un-PC movie about a stag night) and American Sniper (about a U.S. Navy SEAL) is treading the creaky boards of one of the West End’s oldest theatres, appearing at the Theatre Royal Haymarket as Joseph Merrick, the Victorian ‘freak’ known as The Elephant Man.
Geographically, it is 5,440 miles from the Haymarket to Hollywood. Culturally, the gulf may be even greater. In Los Angeles, a star such as Bradley Cooper is treated as a living deity, feted and fussed over, met by purring limousines, flown in private jets.
Top ‘ talent’ is accommodated in enormous Winnebago motor homes on location. Mr Cooper will be accustomed to having his path cleared by fluttering flunkeys and agents lisping: ‘Yes, Bradley, no Bradley, three bags full, Bradley.’ You don’t get that in the West End. Here, the normal weekly wage of an inwork actor is less than £600. Dressing rooms are cramped and may be infested by mice — or ghosts. Backstage areas could be called Dickensian if they were not, in fact, older.
The most you, as a Tinseltown superstar, might get by way of a nightly greeting from the chap on the stage door is a brusque: ‘Wotcha!’ For goodness sake, there are even theatre critics in London who have never heard your name.
So how come Mr Cooper has forsaken California’s Sybaritic delights to become the latest in a surprising number of foreign film stars to appear in the West End? What is it they are looking for?
It can hardly be fame or riches, or an easy ride, for the work is physically exhausting. London audiences are far from respectful. They do not, on the whole, go in for the American habit of clapping big stars at their first entrance.
NICOLE KIDMAN can perhaps be credited for starting the recent wave of celebrity stage appearances when she co-starred in a 1998 production of Sir David Hare’s play The Blue Room. It was staged at the Donmar Warehouse, a theatre so small that Miss Kidman may well have been in bigger hotel suites. Undeterred, her performance was described as ‘pure theatrical Viagra’.
She will be returning to London in September to star in a new play about the British woman scientist who helped discover the structure of DNA.
Cate Blanchett received warm reviews for a role she played in a slightly obscure German play at the Barbican in 2012.
Daniel Radcliffe, having made a fortune from the Harry Potter films, bared himself (literally and artistically) on stage at the Gielgud Theatre in Equus and later took a far from glamorous role as a disabled orphan in The Cripple Of Inishmaan.
Kim Cattrall, of Sex And The City, has been one of several names lured across the Atlantic by the Old Vic’s departing supremo, Kevin Spacey.
In the Tennessee Williams play Sweet Bird Of Youth she demonstrated that her acting talent went a lot deeper than just playing in a sassy TV sitcom.
That will sound snooty — a suggestion that telly actors cannot actually act — but that cultural long-standing bias, I suspect, is what partly drives these screen stars when they come to the West End.
They want to prove they can remember lines, that they have the nous and spontaneity and simple stamina required of performing in front of a live audience.
Jeff Goldblum, Danny DeVito, Hugh Jackman, John Goodman — these and others have taken the risk of appearing on the West End, long after they had a financial need to do so.
Acting, you see, is about more than mere loot. It is more than a living. It is a way of life, and behind many of those blow- dryed telly celebrities there may be a Prince of Denmark or a Lady Macbeth simply itching to get out and tread the boards. France’s Juliette Binoche took the bold step of playing the lead in the Greek tragedy Antigone at the Barbican.
Some critics were less than entirely admiring, but I thought she was fine — and I admired her for taking the artistic risk of taking on one of the most demanding parts in Western drama, and doing so, furthermore, on a vast stage. She had a distinct aura.
This was nothing to do with her film reputations (in The English Patient and Chocolat), I think.
Stage presence is a hard thing to define, but it perhaps stems in part from a combination of physical beauty and self-confidence.
Bradley Cooper certainly has those two things in The Elephant Man, but the paradox with his performance is that he is playing a character who is notoriously ugly.
After all, Mr Cooper has been described by some as ‘the sexiest man in the world’.
Yet he is acting the role of a horribly disfigured man. He does so without mask or fake hump. Instead, he pulls a lopsided gawp on his face. He twists his limbs. He walks with a painful-looking limp.
It is a remarkable performance, intensely theatrical. He could not achieve that level of dramatic pretence on screen because the screen, as a medium, would demand elaborate make-up and the magic leap of imagination of the audience — which is the essence of theatre, arguably — would not occur.
Perhaps it is his very fame as a pinup that encouraged him to essay such a challenging and unphotogenic role.
Famous, that is, to everyone but me! As I recounted in my Mail review of The Elephant Man yesterday, I had no idea who Mr Cooper was when I saw the show.
I came away thinking: ‘ Gosh! That bloke’s good — he could go far.’ My children hooted with scorn when I confessed I had never heard of him. But does that really matter? In the theatre, you are only as good as your current performance.
THE fact is that theatre audiences are far less impressed by flim-flam and reputation. Somehow, it passed me by that Mr Cooper has four times been nominated for an Oscar (the fourth being this year for American Sniper, which he produced and starred in as a military marksman).
Also, I wasn’t aware that following an after-party for The Elephant Man, the 40-year-old was joined by his friend, U.S. Vogue editor Anna Wintour, and his new girlfriend, 29year-old Sports Illustrated model Irina Shayk.
Indeed, it seems that Mr Cooper’s love life has been reported at ridiculous length by showbiz gossip mongers, having dated Burberry model Suki Waterhouse and Hollywood star Jennifer Lawrence and being at the centre of a so-called ‘ bromance’ with fellow actor Gerard Butler, after the pair were spotted giggling together at last summer’s Wimbledon men’s final.
Here is another reason why these bigshots come to the West End. Having reached stages of frustrating hero- worship from Hollywood executives, they must yearn to prove themselves and earn esteem afresh.
And, in the case of Mr Cooper, I bet there is also a desire to be judged
simply for their work. But the gambit of coming to the West End is not without its hazards.
I don’t want to be too mean about Lindsay Lohan because she has had some welldocumented mental health problems, but her top billing last year in Speed-the-Plow at the Playhouse Theatre was not a
succes d’estime (though it may have sold a lot of tickets to people who wanted a gawp at the celebrity wildchild).
James Earl Jones, who, among many other parts did Darth Vader’s voice in the Star Wars series, came a cropper opposite Vanessa Redgrave in Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic.
Oh dear. Mr Earl Jones, at the age of 82, gave the prompter a busy evening. He not only forgot lines, but also found slick entrances and exits a considerable trial.
Home-grown stars, too, who have had a mixed experience are Keira Knightley (wooden as a cricket bat) and Dame Kristin Scott Thomas. Were they assured by their publicists that a theatrical spin would be just what their careers needed? Bad advice!
Stage acting may be about art, but it is also a physical ordeal — having to do six evenings (and probably two matinees) a week.
Outsiders who look at actors and harrumph that ‘ Pah, they’ve never done a real day’s work in their lives’ are speaking claptrap.
It is seriously demanding on the mind and the body, and will be proving doubly so for Mr Cooper as he has to spend much of each performance twisting his body out of shape.
Good on him. I do not envy him his fortune ( well, not much). But I do envy him his acting talent, which is genuine and — now that he has done the proper business in front of a packed Theatre Royal Haymarket — undeniable.