On the poster of “Nightmare Alley” since January 19 in France, Bradley Cooper was not the first choice of Guillermo del Toro, because it was Leonardo DiCaprio who was to play the main role of the film.
With Nightmare Alley, will Bradley Cooper receive his fourth Oscar nomination for Best Actor? If it will be necessary to wait until Tuesday, February 8 to have the heart net, when the candidates will be revealed, the actor seems to have seduced the critics, which is already a great victory in itself. Especially since he wasn’t Guillermo del Toro’s first choice.
For his great return to the cinema, after the triumph of The Shape of Water at the Oscars in early 2018, the Mexican filmmaker had set his sights on Leonardo DiCaprio who, according to a rumor finally denied by Paul Thomas Anderson, had supposedly chosen Nightmare Alley at the expense of Licorice Pizza. Despite financial disagreements prevented this collaboration from taking place, and made the happiness of his replacement Bradley Cooper.
But not at first. “Nightmare Alley is a good example to show how much I lack confidence in myself”, explained the actor to Mahershala Ali, during a conversation organized by variety. “I thought to myself that I wanted to, apparently, always be in the band, because I wasn’t planning on playing in anything that I hadn’t written.”
Nightmare Alley is a good example to show how much I lack confidence in myself
“When the deal fell through with Leonardo DiCaprio, and Guillermo del Toro turned to me, I remember thinking, ‘These people who didn’t want to hire me finally want to hire me?’ And I said to myself that I had to do it because I had never been accepted in this group. It was only ego and lack of self-confidence.
“Fortunately, it turned into an amazing experience. And it was very interesting for me to play a character, Stanton Carlisle, who was traumatized as a child, has no parenting or love foundations, intimacy or real connections. He’s just surviving, looking for gratification and who he is.”
Adapted from the novel by William Lindsay Gresham, who had already given the film The Charlatan in 1947, Nightmare Alley immerses us in a carnival then in the high society of New York in the 1940s, alongside the charismatic and mysterious Stanton Carlisle, determined to put his talents at the service of a scam. Stop aiming too high.