Bradley Cooper’s Maestro makeup took five hours to apply, thank you very much
The makeup that stuck its nose in the discourse’s business a few weeks ago took a very long time to apply
Aux News Maestro
Say what you will about the man, but Bradley Cooper is committed to the bit. When playing Sam Elliott’s brother in A Star Is Born, he made sure that his Elliott impression was impeccable, so the audience could be transported into a world where Cooper and Elliott are cowboy brothers. For Cooper’s latest trick, though, he’s going with a Hollywood classic: Impossible to apply makeup that transforms this young whippersnapper into an old man.
In hopes of outfoxing Helen Mirren’s turn as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir for most questionably antisemitic makeup of the year, Cooper’s overly discussed schnoz for his Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, reportedly took hours to apply, particularly for the elder Bernstein scenes. Per EW, at the New York Film Festival, the Maestro makeup artist, Oscar-winner Kazu Hiro, said applying gray-haired Bernstein’s prosthetics took five hours.
“The last stage, he had covered pretty much everywhere, the bodysuit and arms. That took over 5 hours,” Hiro said. “The last stage, the whole time, our call time was one in the morning […] The other thing was he wanted the makeup to be finished before the crew call so he would appear as Lenny to set up the shoot and everything. That also kind of made our call time two hours earlier than normal, so that was quite tough.”
Referring to the Maestro as “Lenny” shows how close they came in the makeup trailer. This was likely a necessary step in the relationship between Hiro and Lenny because “as he gets older, we had to add more elements.” No longer satisfied with just the “nose and lips and chin and wig” of the younger Maestro, Cooper’s character “started having cheek and neck additions” to become the silver fox version.
Of course, this discussion about how long it took belies the response to the makeup, which was pretty negative. Though the Bernstein family defended Cooper’s decision in “Nose-gate,” there’s no getting around that in the five hours Cooper sat in the makeup chair daily, no one asked, “Are we sure about this?” Whether one thinks the makeup is antisemitic is beside the point because anyone could’ve predicted that outcome. The real question is, how important is Bradley Cooper’s nose to the makeup of the movie? Apparently, the answer is “very.”
Some will see the nose in action on November 22, when the film’s limited theatrical run begins. The rest will have to wait until December 20, when Maestro takes its place in Netflix’s infinite carousel of thumbnails.
11 Comments
The real question is, how important is Bradley Cooper’s nose to the makeup of the movie?I understand the criticism of the nose, but the photos of him in old age makeup certainly suggest they made him look very unlike Bradley Cooper and very much like Bernstein by that point in the movie so for Bernstein biopic, looking like Bernstein is probably the goal and why it was deemed important by the production. Otherwise, we’d probably all be sitting here reading an article about how Bradley Cooper just didn’t care enough to make himself look more like Bernstein.
It looks OK in some scenes, and maybe offensively fake in others, but the cuts are too quick to really say.And like you said, it fits better when he’s old.
This is where I can see why they did what they did with makeup. Not just the nose, but the other prosthetics:
Damn, that’s pretty solid makeup….
Doing a film depicting a real person is tricky, especially if the person was extensively photographed. We all know how Bernstein looked, and if Cooper wants to look like him, that’s ok with me. However, having a well known star looking very different from his normal self can be off putting to an audience, like Jared Leto in the Gucci movie. (A fake nose helped win Nicole Kidman an Oscar, so there’s that, as well.)
The makeup was doing some work in the Gucci movie, but it was hardly the only contributor to an off-putting performance.
in the discourse’s businessUm, what? I mean, just, well, what?
Though the Bernstein family defended Cooper’s decision in “Nose-gate,” there’s no getting around that in the five hours Cooper sat in the makeup chair daily, no one asked, “Are we sure about this?”Yes, I’m pretty sure they were sure about it. This increasingly common take of “we’re not going to provide our own opinion on this ‘scandal,’ but obviously it was very dumb and stupid and shameful for [whoever] to not even consider the reaction of the discourse” is just so fucking dumb. Do you think Cooper’s prosthetics are antisemitic? Why or why not? Otherwise I could not give less of a fuck about the Almighty Discourse. Whether one thinks the makeup is antisemitic is beside the point because anyone could’ve predicted that outcome. It’s the only fucking point, my dude, because what other point could there possibly be? Perhaps—and bear with me here—they did predict that a handful of click-generators would attempt to gin up a non-existent scandal, but they—get this—didn’t care. Wild idea, I know.
Right. It’s a way of dodging the question of whether criticism is justified or not, and instead deferring to whatever people online are willing to say. Whether right or wrong, you were wrong, because some people say you were wrong.
“the discourse”, aka “myopic social media corners where participants greatly overestimate their own reach, importance, and moral readings”
Leonard Bernstein had, to some extent, a stereotypical Jewish nose. It’s not anti-Semitic, when playing Bernstein, to attempt to look like Bernstein. Cooper isn’t attempting to look like a generic Jewish person. He’s attempting (fairly successfully) to look like Bernstein, who looked Jewish.By the same token, it’s a stereotype that all people with Irish ancestry have pale skin and red hair. But if you’re playing Conan O’Brien in a movie, you should probably make sure hair and makeup gives you pale skin and red hair. If you try to look like O’Brien, you’re going to look stereotypically Irish, because O’Brien looks stereotypically Irish.