Bradley Cooper confirms his next directing gig, a movie about Leonard Bernstein called Maestro

It’s been four years since Bradley Cooper kicked off his career as a director with the smash-hit remake of A Star Is Born, and the man who’s lucky enough to effortlessly drift between playing a talking raccoon and playing the manic, Ferrari-driving boyfriend of Barbra Streisand has finally confirmed his directorial follow-up. According to Variety, it will be Maestro, a biopic about legendary Broadway composer Leonard Bernstein and his relationship with his wife Felicia Montealegre.

Cooper (fresh off of a revealing performance in Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, heh heh heh) dropped that news during a conversation with Mahershala Ali for Variety’s “Actors On Actors” series, along with an explanation that he wanted to be a conductor when he was a kid and “asked Santa Claus for a baton” once. Variety says that Steven Spielberg was attached to direct a Leonard Bernstein biopic at one point with Bradley Cooper set to star, but Cooper says he was more excited about writing and directing after the success of A Star Is Born and got Spielberg’s permission to just go ahead and make it himself.

Maestro will still star Cooper, with Carey Mulligan playing Montealegre, and it will be going to Netflix at some point in the future—maybe 2023, maybe later, though filming is going to start in a few months. Variety also notes that it will be going to theaters as well as Netflix, which presumably means it will be one of those awards season runs that exist just to put it in Oscars contention rather than a dramatic shift to how Netflix releases movies.

So get ready to start hearing Bradley Cooper’s name tossed around again during awards season in… two years? Maybe? If not for this, then maybe for Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3, whenever that comes out. The Academy has to recognize Cooper’s vocal performance as Rocket Raccoon at some point, right?