The Way Bradley Cooper Is Talking About Leonard Bernstein Is Getting Weird

Bradley Cooper really can’t let Leonard Bernstein go—to the point that it’s getting super weird.

I thought it was bad enough that Cooper revealed to Indiewire that he thought he was Bernstein. It seemed like we couldn’t get worse than Cooper saying, “I hoped that he would come every day into me.”

“It was scary, the idea of it not happening and I would have to act,” Cooper said. “But thank goodness every day of the 55- or 56-day shoot, it did happen. So then I’m just me as him and then directing and acting in the movie. The crew were so kind to embrace that illusion. I never felt vulnerable in a way that would shut me down. Instead, it felt like everybody was living in this illusion that Lenny was there.”

Now though, Cooper has taken to crying about how much he misses a man he never met—while the Bernstein children were sitting with him. Cooper actually did this in December but we’re all currently too embarrassed by the ghost of Bernstein coming into Cooper comments to let this newly resurfaced moment go.

Cooper appeared on CBS Sunday Morning with Jamie, Nina, and Alexander Bernstein for an exclusive interview with Mo Rocca and when Cooper was asked if he missed Lenny, he started to cry. Bradley Cooper has never met Leonard Bernstein. His children, however, have.

“It’s hard to talk about,” Cooper said when asked what he misses about Bernstein. “I don’t know—we, the four of us, shared something very special, it’s hard to even articulate. He was with me, certainly, throughout the entire time. His energy has somehow found its way to me, and I really do feel like I know him.”

None of this is warming me on Maestro

I already had issues with Maestro that were rooted in Cooper’s exclusion of Bernstein’s legacy in musical theatre. Cooper talking as if he knew Lenny as his children are sitting next to him re-enforces my other issue with the movie: It’s not a subjective look at the man. While I don’t think the movie should have completely gone the other direction, I do think that the Bernstein children were too involved to shine any kind of light onto Leonard Bernstein that was anything other than positive.

The end result was a movie that feels like a love letter to their father. These interviews, though, romanticize Bernstein to the extent that they end up feeling extremely dismissive of him as a real human.

Saying that the ghost of the man came to you specifically to make this movie? That’s categorically unhinged. I just want this award season to end so I can stop hearing about this because it is actually getting ridiculous.

(featured image: Netflix)