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Bradley Cooper tests his limits
Greg Truman
March 19, 2011 - 12:05AM
Squeezed in between a couple of massive ''hangovers'', a focused Advertisement
Bradley Cooper is making a determined run at stamping himself
as the next big dramatic star in Hollywood.
Cooper will reprise the role of witty and relatively wise Phil
Wenneck in the eagerly awaited sequel to the 2009 smash hit The
Hangover in coming months but he's hoping movie-goers will
hold the laughs when they take in his new film, Limitless - the
36-year-old actor's first chance to carry a big-screen thriller.
''A nervous laugh, that's OK,'' he says, noting the potential of a
particularly bloody scene in the Neil Burger-directed film to make
audiences squirm in their seats.
Having cemented his comedic credibility, first with a star turn in
Wedding Crashers in 2005, Cooper, while grateful for the heightened profile provided by The Hangover, wants to
explore other ''big storytelling opportunities''.
''I mean, three years ago, I just wanted to get a job,'' he tells Metro in New York.
''When The Hangover came out it got a little easier, although I still audition for stuff.
''If you just take what comes along, at some point you're going to be in serious trouble because what comes along is
probably stuff people have seen you do before.''
Cooper came on board Limitless, based on Alan Glynn's novel The Dark Fields, when Shia LaBeouf pulled out after
he was injured in a car accident.
T he Philadelphia-born-and-bred actor says he wanted to ensure he seized with both hands the chance to take
another positive step in a career that has included successes in television (Alias) and on Broadway (Three Days of
Rain with Julia Roberts). He lobbied hard and successfully to get his acting hero, Robert De Niro, to agree to play a
role in the film.
In Limitless, Cooper plays a struggling New York writer, Eddie Morra, who is fast fading into oblivion before he
takes an experimental drug, NZT , that allows him to access ''100 per cent'' of his brain and induces spurts of
uncommon knowledge and perception. Using this insight, the once-hapless Morra springs quickly to the top of the
financial world.
Along the way he has to deal with the unwanted side-effects of NZT and attracts the attention of an
organised-crime thug and shadowy figures with nefarious intent.
''It's about power: how he utilises that power,'' says Cooper, whose main squeeze in the movie is Australian Abbie
Cornish.
De Niro provides gravitas as uncompromising corporate king Carl Van Loon, a role the actor acknowledged wasn't
the most challenging in his long career ''but I put a lot of work into it''.
''I wanted to work with Bradley and Neil,'' De Niro says. ''Sometimes, even when it's not perfect, you do it to work
with people so you can work with them again later on. You establish a relationship.''
Cooper hopes to build on that connection in future collaborations with the man he says is ''the reason I became an
actor''.
Having first caught the theatrical bug as an eight-year-old on stage in Around the World in 80 Days, Cooper says
he ''always knew I'd be an actor, although I didn't do anything about it after that for a long time''.
''Ask a kid when he's 15 in the suburbs of Philadelphia, 'What are you going to do with your life?' and he says, 'Be
an actor'; you laugh at him. T hat's what I got a lot.''
He ended up at New York's Actors Studio where, as a student, he found himself asking De Niro a question during
taping for an episode of the Q&A series Inside the Actors Studio.
It's been a gradual climb to fame for Cooper, a film buff who has a desire to direct. ''If this is successful, maybe I'll
do one or two more of these and then I would want to direct. I love the entertainment business … I've met the
greatest people in the world. People who are very successful, like Bob [De Niro] and Liam Neeson and Christopher
Walken: these are wonderful guys.''
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/bradley-cooper-tests-his-limits-20110317-1bxkf.html