Bradley Cooper sat down with Joe Rogan on The Joe Rogan Experience and opened up about one of the more physically dangerous moments of his acting career, revealing how a fellow actor’s split-second reaction may have saved him from real harm during the making of the film Burnt.
Cooper explained that he had worked with the actor years earlier on the film, playing a chef opposite him in a scene that called for raw emotional intensity. The two actors had never met before filming the pivotal scene together, which involved Cooper’s character struggling with sobriety and confronting an old rival.
“And there’s a scene where my character, he was trying to get sober and he went off the wagon. And he goes to this guy, his old nemesis. They were nemesis to each other. [He goes] to his restaurant, after hours. And it was like a pretty dark scene. We had never met, me and this guy, this actor, before we shot,” Cooper told Rogan.
What happened next went beyond the scripted material. Cooper described improvising with a plastic bag in a moment meant to depict his character’s suicidal despair, and just how convincing the moment became in the room.
“There was one scene which wasn’t really scripted. I took one of those sous vide bags and I put it over my head, because he’s trying to [off] himself. Which, by the way, I was like: ‘Oh, this could work!’ If I don’t get help. Those things are strong and tight,” Cooper said.
He then described the other actor stepping outside the scripted moment to intervene physically, tearing the bag away from him even though the two barely knew each other off camera.
“Then we had this experience, Joe, where he was ripping it off me, trying for me not to [off] myself. And I don’t know him that well, but we had… that’s the thing about making art together. We had that experience,” Cooper said.
Cooper said the experience created an unusual, permanent bond between the two performers despite having only crossed paths a handful of times since.
“Every time I see him, I’ve seen him maybe six times at certain things or something, I always feel like we’re bonded forever just based on this one experience that we had,” he said.
