Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan bare their souls as Leonard and Felicia Bernstein in Maestro.
Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein have taken up some percentage of Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan’s day-to-day lives for more than six years now. Between talking with the Bernsteins’ children — Jamie, Alexander, and Nina — listening to recordings of formal interviews with the couple and informal dinner parties they held, excavating their own dreams, and spending time at the Bernsteins’ Fairfield, Connecticut house, the two actors have slowly come to understand what made these larger-than-life legends human.
Mulligan and Cooper, who also directs, co-writes, and produces the film, tell the story of the Bernsteins’ passionate and complex marriage in Maestro, which has captivated audiences since its Venice Film Festival premiere in September. Cooper and Mulligan’s years of preparation and dedication are brought to life by some of the best below-the-line talent in the industry, including writer Josh Singer; hair and makeup artists Kazu Hiro, Kay Georgiou, and Lori McCoy-Bell; cinematographer Matthew Libatique; and the sound team of Steven A. Morrow, Richard King, Jason Ruder, Tom Ozanich, and Dean Zupancic — all of whom have earned Oscar nominations for their work.
Cooper crafts a compelling and stylish narrative, yet what’s most powerful is how the film — and its director-star — are imbued with the way Leonard lived his extraordinary life. “What he taught me and what working with Carey, the crew, this film as a lived experience taught me was to just keep being bold,” says Cooper. “If you look at Lenny, that’s clearly how he created and lived.”
In addition to Maestro’s seven Oscar nominations, Cooper and Mulligan have earned nods for Best Actor and Best Actress at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, which will stream on Netflix on February 24. In honor of their nominations, Hugh Jackman asked the actors about the vulnerability and connection at the heart of the astonishing Maestro. “Being bold is what you’ve both done in this film,” Jackman told the performers. “It’s an inspiration to all of us.”
An edited version of the conversation follows.
Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein (Carey Mulligan)
Hugh Jackman: Carey, you’re playing Felicia over 30 years. What parts of her character were constant through that, and which parts evolved?
Carey Mulligan: I do think she went on a huge journey. We were so lucky we had these amazing tapes of them being interviewed and also of them just being [that we listened to] constantly, every day. John Gruen wrote a book called The Private World of Leonard Bernstein, and we had these original recordings that he [used]. There was an amazing dinner in Italy on holiday in 1967 [during which] he put his tape recorder in the middle of the table and pressed record, and they told the story of when they got married and how it was just complete calamity. Everyone got really drunk and took pills, and there were just tons of capers — you could hear them just completely being themselves.
I was struck by how wry she was, how she held herself. There was a poise to her and an elegance that went into everything. She always knew exactly how she felt about things outside of herself. But there was also an element of self-protection and self-delusion that fueled her through her relationship. I wanted to go back to where she came from: She grew up in Santiago, Chile and spent lots of time coming to America. She made the choice to move to New York as a very young woman. I thought, What an extraordinarily courageous thing to do. There were just so many facets of her personality that I could have just kept learning about her forever.
Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper)
Jackman: How long was [dialect coach] Tim Monich with you, Bradley?
Cooper: We started when I was still finishing A Star Is Born. As he aged, Lenny’s voice went down an octave because of smoking, a deviated septum, and all of the ways he lived. He was an insomniac and had asthma. There’s great audio of him leaving this message for [dancer and choreographer] Jerome Robbins that we basically put verbatim in the movie. We just had these wonderful pieces of primary source material.
When I first started acting, all I wanted was, Can I just be me in the voice that I’m talking to you in right now? I’d leave an audition and my voice would be hoarse because I was so not connected to what I was doing. But then, because I had the privilege of working over a long period of time, I started to get bolder. I remember Willem Dafoe came to our school and said, “I only choose [roles] that scare me.” I thought at the time, Well, I’ll never do that because I only want to do something that I think I could possibly do. But now it’s all about doing something that’s absolutely terrifying, but you feel maybe deep down there’s a place for you to connect with that character.
The voice has been, in the latter half of my career, the key. I feel like it was the same experience that I had in grad school — all we wanted to do was work and do ridiculous things to get into character and experiment. That’s the thing about being able to direct it: You’re like, we can do whatever the fuck we want.
[I felt I got the voice] after a long, long time — probably six months before we started shooting. Carey was a huge part of [it]: I would call her often as Lenny, and many of my other friends, and they were like, “No, you don’t have it. Nowhere close. Are you sick? What’s going on?”
Jackman: Carey, I’d love you to talk about finding Felicia’s physicality and about the later years with her illness.
Mulligan: We listened to [Lenny and Felicia] all the time, we read everything we could about them, we looked at all the photographs. We talked to the kids — Jamie, Alexander, and Nina — who were just amazing. They just gave us so much access. So I felt like we’d spent so much time with [Lenny and Felicia], oddly, but there was a part of me that thought, I’ve never played a character over this span of time.
Because we had spent so much time with these characters, I was tracking where Felicia was by Bradley. When I looked into young Lenny, I felt young. When I was unwell, Bradley as Lenny and everyone around me on set were treating me like I was very unwell. So the way that Bradley constructed it, the way that the set felt, and the way the crew were invested, a lot of it was just instinctive.
Bradley Cooper and Gustavo Dudamel
Jackman: Bradley, I’d love for you to illuminate that process of learning to conduct.
Cooper: We had learned on A Star Is Born that if you record the vocals live, it’s pretty invaluable story-wise. That one scene in the church that we had, I didn’t know any other better way to do it than if we actually did it. The London Symphony Orchestra certainly did not need me there to do it at all, but the thing I was trying to achieve desperately is just the utter joy that Lenny had communicating with the orchestra.
I’d spent so many moments with [conductor] Jaap [van Zweden] here at the New York Phil and in Los Angeles with Gustavo Dudamel, and then in Philadelphia with Yannick Nézet-Séguin. They opened their doors to me, and there was just this incredible thing where I would sit in the wings where everything’s in profile. I wasn’t ever trying to mimic him because I knew that would be a fool’s errand, but can I somehow communicate just that fearless joy? It felt very naked, but it was beautiful.
Jackman: This is an epic love story, ultimately. How did you work to create that dynamic?
Cooper: In grad school I learned from Elizabeth Kemp this dream workshop that I found invaluable and that I’d always done on my own for movies. Then I started to do it with the other actors when I started to direct movies. [Carey’s] teacher, Kim Gillingham, who’s fantastic, had done a dream workshop with [acting coach] Sandra Seacat. So they all had sort of funneled from the same place, and we spent six days — I think that was the cornerstone of our connection. We’d always known each other and it was so wonderful to have Carey during the writing process of the movie, but it wasn’t until we did that that I felt completely free with Carey.
I’ve never done anything like this before. It’s mad.
—Carey Mulligan
Jackman: In those six days, are you a mixture of you and the characters? How does it work?
Cooper: You’re doing exercises like loss and betrayal as an adult and child as yourself and as the characters. Then it ends in a ritual that you perform for the other person, the final element of this gift you’re giving to the other person and to the work.
Mulligan: It was really a mixture. It’s connecting your subconscious to the work. Within that, there’s so much personal stuff, but there are also things that you do discover about Lenny and Felicia, and their connection. The day before that we went up to their house in Fairfield. Kim was like, “Now just go around the house as Lenny and Felicia.”
I’ve never done anything like this before. It’s mad. You just find yourself. I was like, I get to work with Bradley Cooper; I get to act with him. I get to be directed by him. I’ll do whatever. I was scared shitless, but actually, it just made the world of difference in so many ways.
Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein (Carey Mulligan) and Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper)
Jackman: I really would love to talk about the Thanksgiving scene.
Cooper: Carey drives the whole scene and that’s the only reason we were able to stay in that wide shot. It could be the way I was with my sister and how my parents fought as a kid — that was the genesis of that scene. I was always most scared [when I was] far away listening to a fight. I wasn’t in the middle looking at my mom in a closeup. I felt like if I did that for you, you would feel safe and know it’s a movie. But if I put you where I was — at least as a kid that didn’t feel safe to me.
Jackman: Carey, the character was so poised and you could feel the decades of frustration, of unsaid things. I want to hear from you how that day went.
Mulligan: The first thing he wrote for the whole movie was that [Thanksgiving fight scene]. So I got that at the end of 2018. I was putting my kids in the bath, and I was like, “Oh my God, this is so good.”
It was the last thing we shot in New York in that main chunk of shooting, but I don’t think I built it up any more than any other scene, except that I was excited to do it because it’s such brilliant writing. We had shot almost the entire film, so I’d lived all the things that were fueling that anger. We did the first two takes and then, this is what Bradley would do the whole way through the shoot: It would be more subtle than [giving notes] and more holistic. He would change what Lenny was doing to make me change what I was doing. So I remember that he walked in with the sunglasses on, holding a carton of milk. And I went, Oh. And he bumped into the sofa and I was like, You fucking . . .oh, now we’re going to fight.
Jackman: What’s it like being directed by your co-star?
Mulligan: For me, it was the best. There were no separate hats being worn. He had done the work and also he is talented enough as an actor to pull it off. We were at [the] Santa Barbara [International Film Festival] the other day and they showed clips from Bradley’s career, and I literally just wanted to watch all of those films again. It makes your job so much easier when you’re looking to the other person and you’re like, “I believe every single thing you’re doing.”
Jackman: What have you learned from Lenny that you take away in your life?
Cooper: Be bold. There was that moment every morning where I had to take that leap of faith; I always made the choice to jump off the cliff to be Lenny. That leap felt like me letting something in, not me acting. And I was terrified every day of the 54 days [of filming], whether he would come in. I would even say to him, “I hope he comes today, because [otherwise] we’re fucked.” If I’m thinking about what I’m doing as an actor, the whole machine’s going to break down. The only way I know how to act is to just be absolutely willing to make a fool out of yourself.
