I love Bradley Cooper. There I’ve said it. He’s a brilliant actor, writer, director, and producer, loved and respected by audiences, peers, and critics alike.
He hasn’t put a foot wrong in a notoriously fickle industry. Let’s face it, who doesn’t love him? But this week the trailer for his latest film, Maestro “a love letter to the life and art” of Jewish composer Leonard Bernstein, was released and has garnered headlines and commentary of a more critical nature.
Cooper has donned a prosthetic nose for the duration of the film to portray Bernstein. And the burning question is- why? Why did Bradley Cooper with a healthy-shaped nose himself, feel that it was necessary to don a large prosthetic proboscis to play the great man when the nose he dons is larger and more prominent (as far as the trailer and production stills show) than the one that Leonard Bernstein had in real life.
When one thinks of Lenny Bernstein, the first thing that comes to mind is not the size of his nose. It was not his defining feature and to my understanding neither commented on by others nor part of his self-identity. Bradley Cooper is not Jewish. He played the Elephant Man on stage without a single prosthetic to acclaim.
Surely he would have been able to embody Lenny Bernstein with all his skills as an actor, from the inside out. To have dug deep to find what made the Maestro tick. and to approach his Jewishness from the inside, find ways to embody the Jewish essence of the man without the need to stick on a large nose. It’s triggering.
Many non-Jewish friends and acquaintances have completely understood it. Images of anti-Jewish Nazis propaganda films and cartoons, Jew Suss type of malevolent males, and black and white pictures of Nazi guards measuring nose sizes of Jewish people to determine non-Aryan looks on the way to concentration camps, and the prototypes of English medieval drawings of ugly Jewish men with large hook noses, holding bags of money surrounded by virtuous Christians.
Noses are sensitive to Jews. It’s a racial trope that has been thrown at us for hundreds of years. I am currently playing a female Shylock in the Merchant of Venice. My research has painfully thrown up the hook noses that actors have worn since the 16th century to make a quick semiotic image of an “evil, slippery” Jew.
So yes, Bradley Cooper's choice to play a Jewish man with a stuck on a large Jewish nose has upset many.
I am often asked if non-Jewish actors should play Jewish parts.
Eddie Marsan has played numerous Jewish husbands to my Jewish wife, Omid Djalili played Tevye to my Golde in Fiddler on the Roof. I’ve been in television series telling Jewish stories where I have sometimes been the only Jewish cast member.
As actors, we train intensely for the craft of acting. To be able to analyse a script, create a living breathing character from words on a page, have the technical skills to move an audience to make them laugh, navigate a film set, to be able to perform 8 shows a week with two matinees, and make every performance appear fresh and new.
An actor should be able to play any part, that is our job. I’ve played a plethora of roles from nuns to Catholic murderers. Every part should be open to the best person for the job.
In recent times, however, there have been great strides toward sensitivity and debate over ethnic and minority representations on stage and screen. The great Russel T Davies said of the casting of his award-winning AIDS drama “You wouldn’t cast someone able-bodied and put them in a wheelchair, you wouldn’t black someone up -an actor is NOT there to act gay, because acting gay is a bunch of codes for a performance, its about authenticity`’. The idea of Black Face or Yellow Face is anathema in 2023.
Jewface is also something we should be taking as seriously. I’d like to think that the casting of Jewish characters is treated with the same debate and sensitivity as any other minority part. But as I say, actors act.
Cillian Murphy’s brilliant portrayal of J Robert Oppenheimer worked because he not only does look like Oppenheimer but he intrinsically captured, for me, the anxieties and drive of Oppenheimer’s Jewishness in 1940s America. It was subtle but it was powerful. Similarly, for me, Tom Conti captured the essence of the Jewish Albert Einstein. Not a prosthetic in sight.
Some people have no problem at all with Bradly Cooper's prosthetic Jewish nose, indeed, Bernstein’s family has come out in total support. And who wouldn’t want Bradly Cooper playing their much-loved father, with or without a stuck-on schnoz.
But as producer and director and star Bradley Cooper maybe didn’t have the objectivity to truly understand the optics of his choice, In the word of Lawrence Olivier “Just act it, dear boy”.
