Bradley Cooper’s new movie Maestro sees the actor play the piano, but is it really him tickling the ivories? The Netflix biopic tells the story of American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, and Cooper serves as the film’s star, co-writer, and director. It was a project over six years in the making, and it’s safe to assume that a slew of awards will be the consequence. As well as wearing extensive prosthetics and makeup to make himself look like Bernstein, Cooper had to perfect the man’s mannerisms while conducting and performing, which meant looking natural at a piano. So, just how far did the actor go?
The subject of Netflix’s Maestro was the first American conductor to achieve global renown and the youngest to conduct the New York Philharmonic. Bernstein was known to lead orchestras and choirs from behind the piano, so it was inevitable that Cooper would need to sit before some keys in the process of making the biopic. Of course, this is far from the first time an actor has needed to pretend to know how to play a musical instrument, and it’s common practice for more knowledgeable doubles to be used. However, this wasn’t the way Cooper wanted to go for Maestro.
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Bradley Cooper Did Play The Piano In Maestro (But You Don’t Hear It)
Cooper was going for gold with Maestro, so he took up piano to bring as much authenticity to his portrayal of Bernstein as possible. In an interview with Classic FM, the actor and director explained that, during the scene in which Bernstein plays the piano with his friend Aaron Copland (portrayed by Brian Clements), he and his costar really were playing the song. “We spent months learning that piece,” Cooper said, “And that’s us playing.” However, he explained that what audiences hear during this scene is not their own work. A “much better version” was played over the scene instead.
Cooper noted that the piece he played during this scene of Maestro is about the extent of what he is capable of on piano, aside from what he learned during A Star is Born. He learned what was necessary for the biopic to avoid the headache of cutting to the hand of a professional between shots of him pretending to play or using editing magic to swap his face onto a piano-playing double. Ultimately, this made filming and editing easier but also brought another layer of authenticity to the film—making the depiction of Bernstein in Maestro all the more faithful.
Bradley Cooper Also Had To Learn How To Conduct An Orchestra For Maestro
Though an excellent pianist, Bernstein is best remembered as a composer and conductor (notably composing the Broadway musical West Side Story), which meant Cooper also needed to learn this skill. Body doubles and editing would have been even more complicated for the scenes in Maestro in which Cooper conducted full orchestras in front of real audiences, so the actor spent years working with and consulting Yannick Nézet-Séguin, director of the Metropolitan Opera and Philadelphia Orchestra.
All this work allowed Cooper to pull off the six-minute-long scene in which his character conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony at Ely Cathedral (something Bernstein famously did in 1973). For this pivotal moment in Maestro, Cooper conducted this same orchestra for the same piece in the same cathedral, all in front of a real audience. In his interview with Classic FM, Cooper explained that the first day shooting this scene was a nightmare, but his years of work eventually paid off. They had one long take of perfection, which is ultimately what made it into Netflix’s Maestro.
Maestro Is One Of Bradley Cooper’s Best Ever Performances
It’s clear from the amount of work that Cooper put into Maestro that he was aiming to create his masterpiece—the performance of a lifetime. As the director, co-writer, and star of the film, Cooper went all in, and his years analyzing Bernstein’s mannerisms and learning how to play piano and conduct certainly paid off. Maestro has an 80 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, with an overwhelming number of critics predicting a busy award season for the actor. The consensus is that Maestro will result in Cooper finally getting his first Oscar win—it would be the best possible outcome of all those piano lessons.
