‘Burnt’ stars stir emotions again in comedy-drama
Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller also sharedscreen in ‘Sniper.’
Beware of Bradley Cooper’s temper.
Not the real Cooper, of course. The one to duck is his Michelinstar chef, Adam Jones, in Burnt (in theaters Oct. 30), a recovering addict who hurls plates at his staff, dodges drug dealers and shoves his sous chef across the kitchen.
That sous chef would be Helene (Sienna Miller), Jones’ equal at the stove and, eventually, the object of his affections. In real life, this pair has operated on a steady boil for the past year.
Cooper and Miller starred as husband and wife in American
Sniper, which earned Cooper his third Oscar nomination. Weeks after wrapping Sniper, they hopped from the war drama into a stainless-steel kitchen.
“It was somewhat schizophrenic to see him, having been this big Chris Kyle and then sud- denly he’s in his chef whites,” Miller says. The actor shed 20 pounds of
Sniper weight (he had gained 40), fast. “I’m actually still pretty big in this film,” says Cooper, whose hotheaded chef is determined to launch a comeback and earn three coveted Michelin Guide stars (the ultimate rating in the fine-dining world).
Cooper and Miller adapted differently to the demands of highpressure cooking. Cooper had restaurant experience under his belt: His grandmother is Italian, and growing up, he was a busboy in a Greek restaurant and a prep cook at a seafood restaurant.
So those would be his hands shucking a crate of fresh oysters in the opening scene of Burnt. “There’s no stunt double. There’s no chef double,” he says.
Miller, a novice, was run through a truncated cooking school under the watch of star British chef Marcus Wareing at his two-Michelin-star restaurant, Marcus, in London. “Marcus taught me how to cook fish and how to fillet a turbot, which is something I had to do in the film,” she says. “He also taught me how to make pasta, which was a really great skill because that’s something I love to eat.”
The star chef gifted the actress with a pasta machine, but “it’s gathering dust,” Miller, 33, says with a sigh. “I’m ashamed to say I haven’t actually used it yet, but I intend to.”
Cooper, who wowed Wareing with his artful plating skills, says he’s still in a bit of a food coma.
“It’s been hard to get the last 20 (pounds) off, I’ll tell you that,” he says of his Sniper bulk. “I’m almost 41, and it’s definitely harder as I get older.
“I remember Russell Crowe talking about (weight struggles after) Cinderella Man and how after Gladiator, it was almost impossible for him to lose weight. And last year I went, ‘ Uh oh.’ ”