On Wednesday, the family of legendary composer Leonard Bernstein spoke out in Bradley Cooper’s defense after criticism of the actor’s decision to wear a prosthetic nose in the biopic Maestro spread across the internet.
“Bradley Cooper included the three of us along every step of his amazing journey as he made his film about our father,” the statement, signed by Bernstein’s children Jamie, Alexander, and Nina, reads. “It breaks our hearts to see any misrepresentations or misunderstandings of his efforts. It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a big, nice nose. Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.”
Their statement continued: “Any strident complaints around this issue strike us above all as disingenuous attempts to bring a successful person down a notch—a practice we observed all too often perpetrated on our own father.”
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The first trailer for Maestro, Cooper’s second film as a director and a self-starring vehicle, debuted on Tuesday ahead of its theatrical release in November. Cooper is Irish-Italian, and some people interpreted the pronounced prosthetic nose he dons in the film to be problematic.
Critics argued that a non-Jewish actor donning a prominent prosthetic nose to play a Jewish person plays into antisemitic ethnic stereotypes. “Bradley Cooper should not be wearing a prosthetic nose,” one person tweeted. “This is Jew-face & is as serous & offensive as Black-face or the racialising of other minorities.”
Other detractors postulated that a Jewish actor should have been chosen to play Bernstein, adding that before Cooper acquired the rights to Bernstein’s story, Jake Gyllenhaal, whose mother is Jewish, made an unsuccessful effort to get his own movie about the West Side Story composer made.
“Remember how Bradley Cooper basically stole the rights for this film from a Jewish man who had been passionately trying to make it for years?” another person tweeted.
Cooper has yet to publicly comment on the backlash.
