Something funny happened while Bradley Cooper was in the midst of the Hangover trilogy: He became an award-gobbling movie star. In between editions two and three, Cooper starred in Silver Linings Playbook, which earned him his first Academy Award nomination. He didn’t seem all that stoked to be in Part III, and when it was over he earned even more Oscar noms and even became an acclaimed director. Does that mean he’s too good to return to the franchise? Absolutely not.
Per The Daily Beast, Cooper chatted with David Remnick for Friday’s installment of The New Yorker Radio Hour. They talked Maestro, Cooper’s directorial follow-up to A Star is Born in which he plays legendary composer Leonard Bernstein (with a controversial fake nose). It’s a serious film (with some jokes), and it prompted Remnick to ask the guy who broke through with films like Wedding Crashers and Failure to Launch if he was “done with fun.” He then mentioned him doing a potential “Hangover 5.”
“Well, I would do Hangover 5,” Cooper quickly interjected, before correcting Remnick’s mistake: “It would be Hangover 4 first, but yeah.”
“You would do that in a flash? Not just to pay the bills,” Remnick asked him.
“I would do probably Hangover 4 in an instant, yeah,” Cooper replied, “just because I love [director] Todd [Phillips], I love Zach [Galifianakis], I love Ed [Helms] so much. I probably would, yeah.”
That said, Cooper added, “I don’t think Todd’s ever going to do that.” (Perhaps Cooper was intimating that Phillips, like him, has moved on to very different fare, in his case the far darker Joker films, the next of which adds Cooper’s Star is Born costar Lady Gaga.)
Cooper then took umbrage with Remnick’s language: “You said the word, ‘fun.’ There’s nothing more fun that I’ve ever experienced than Maestro and A Star Is Born. This is me having fun.”
It’s not uncommon these days for franchises to get dusted off after a decade or so, or even decades. Perhaps it will take another 20 years for a fourth Hangover that’s about one of the gang’s kids getting married and having a bachelor party gone creatively wrong. We’re just spit-balling here.
In the meantime, Maestro is now in select theaters and will stream on Netflix starting December 20.
(Via The Daily Beast)