Carey Mulligan Says Bradley Cooper Began Speaking Like Leonard Bernstein ‘A Full Year’ Before Filming Maestro

Carey Mulligan was surprised by the amount of work Bradley Cooper put into portraying Leonard Bernstein in their new film.

Like Mulligan, who plays the late composer Bernstein’s wife Felicia Montealegre in the upcoming Netflix drama Maestrotalked to Diversity about the biopic, she said Cooper, 48, did “a mammoth amount of research and preparation in every aspect” while writing, directing and starring in the film.

“We really rehearsed it like a play. We had so much preparation,” she said. “We also spent a week together doing a special workshop on just our two characters – just Bradley and I exploring who Lenny and Felicia were and how that related to us.”

Mulligan said she had “never seen anyone prepare for a character like that [Cooper] prepared for Lenny.”

“It was amazing. He was calling me in full dialect for a full year before we even got to New York,” she told the news outlet. “I mean, it was amazing. When we were filming it, it just didn’t feel like we had to think a lot. And I think not having to think about it made it very easy to just answer things.”

Bradley Cooper asked Carey Mulligan to ‘bare their souls to each other’ in preparation for Maestro Roles

Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan in ‘The Maestro’.

Courtesy of Netflix

MaestroMakeup designer Kazu Hiro previously revealed that the production “made a nose plug” Cooper wore inside the prosthetic nose he used to look and sound more like Bernstein, who died aged 72 in 1990. Maestro primarily follows the romance and marriage of the famous composer from Montealegra, which lasted from 1951 until her death in 1978.

The official logline for the film describes Maestro as “a sublime and fearless love story that chronicles the lifelong relationship between Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegra Cohn Bernstein.”

Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan filming ‘Maestro’ on May 31, 2022. Gotham/GC Pictures

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Maestro marks Cooper’s second feature film as writer and director, in addition to an already impressive acting career. Cooper also went to great lengths to change his voice for 2018 A star is born: He said Entertainment Weekly that year when he tried to “lower his voice an octave” to play the fictional rock star Jackson Maine.

Leonard Bernstein’s daughter on the ‘surreal’ viewing experience Maestro Film about her family: ‘What a ride’

Carey Mulligan and Bradley Cooper in ‘The Maestro’.

Jason McDonald/Netflix

“So I hired [dialect coach] Tim Monich early on — I think, like, a year before the movie was shot,” Cooper recounted at the time. “He moved to LA and we worked five days a week, four hours a day rehearsing and getting the voice down. It was brutal and it went on for months and months and months.”

Cooper also shared during his A star is born press run that he used his co-star, Sam Elliott, as a reference point for how low he wanted his voice to sound. During an appearance in February 2019 on The Late Show with Stephen ColbertCooper even said he was working on changing his vote for A star is born so much so that he would “fall asleep and I would have a sore throat”.

Maestro will play in select theaters in November before arriving on Netflix on Wednesday, December 20.

Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education