Bradley Cooper’s Maestro makeup took five hours to apply, thank you very much

Say what you will about the man, but Bradley Cooper is committed to the bit. When playing Sam Elliott’s brother in A Star Is Born, he made sure that his Elliott impression was impeccable, so the audience could be transported into a world where Cooper and Elliott are cowboy brothers. For Cooper’s latest trick, though, he’s going with a Hollywood classic: Impossible to apply makeup that transforms this young whippersnapper into an old man.

In hopes of outfoxing Helen Mirren’s turn as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir for most questionably antisemitic makeup of the year, Cooper’s overly discussed schnoz for his Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, reportedly took hours to apply, particularly for the elder Bernstein scenes. Per EW, at the New York Film Festival, the Maestro makeup artist, Oscar-winner Kazu Hiro, said applying gray-haired Bernstein’s prosthetics took five hours.

“The last stage, he had covered pretty much everywhere, the bodysuit and arms. That took over 5 hours,” Hiro said. “The last stage, the whole time, our call time was one in the morning […] The other thing was he wanted the makeup to be finished before the crew call so he would appear as Lenny to set up the shoot and everything. That also kind of made our call time two hours earlier than normal, so that was quite tough.”

Referring to the Maestro as “Lenny” shows how close they came in the makeup trailer. This was likely a necessary step in the relationship between Hiro and Lenny because “as he gets older, we had to add more elements.” No longer satisfied with just the “nose and lips and chin and wig” of the younger Maestro, Cooper’s character “started having cheek and neck additions” to become the silver fox version.

Of course, this discussion about how long it took belies the response to the makeup, which was pretty negative. Though the Bernstein family defended Cooper’s decision in “Nose-gate,” there’s no getting around that in the five hours Cooper sat in the makeup chair daily, no one asked, “Are we sure about this?” Whether one thinks the makeup is antisemitic is beside the point because anyone could’ve predicted that outcome. The real question is, how important is Bradley Cooper’s nose to the makeup of the movie? Apparently, the answer is “very.”

Some will see the nose in action on November 22, when the film’s limited theatrical run begins. The rest will have to wait until December 20, when Maestro takes its place in Netflix’s infinite carousel of thumbnails.