Bradley Cooper On Controversial Role Of Chris Kyle In American Sniper

Bradley Cooper has received another Oscar Nomination and this time for playing Navy SEAL Chris Kyle in American Sniper. The film directed by Clint Eastwood has been both a critical and commercial success. However, the film does have its controversies regarding the depiction of the Iraq War. He talked to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. Here are some highlights:

Kyle was a Navy SEAL and is considered by many the most skilled sniper in U.S. military history. He killed an estimated 160 people and was nicknamed “The Legend.” After surviving four tours in Iraq, he was murdered near his home by a troubled vet he was trying to help.

On framing American Sniper like a Western film

“I love the idea of framing it as a Western, I thought that could be cinematically viable, ripe for cinema, and that this guy happened to be incredibly charismatic. …

You have a guy going into a town and there’s his equivalent on the other side, another sharpshooter. He’s a sharpshooter, and [it ends in] tumbleweeds, a dust storm, there’s a showdown, this sort of one man and his pursuit — that idea. Framing this genre within a Western construct was something I thought would be interesting.”

On studying Chris Kyle for the role

“I basically made this document where I had every single thing he’s ever said recorded, and I would just listen to it. And it’d be the first thing I woke up with in the morning — I’d just put on the earbuds right away — and last thing I listened to at night, just to really soak him in. Something about him was just beautiful.

It’s just horrible, seeing videos — home videos — where they have the date on the bottom right corner and it would be November 2012 or … Thanksgiving, Christmas, and then knowing that a month later on Feb. 2, 2013, his life would be ended. I mean it was just a very emotional thing to be watching. I almost felt like I was an alien or somebody from the future doing research coming into this man’s life and watching every single thing he did knowing the end of the story. Sitting in his dining room table, in the same chair he sat in a year prior, with Clint [Eastwood] opposite me with [Kyle’s wife] Taya and the children, and having watched a video of him in that chair, it was just a very surreal experience — and one that really prompted me to work in a way that I didn’t even know I was able to.”

On gaining 40 pounds of muscle to play Kyle

It wasn’t at all like a costume. It was like … this sort of transformative experience to me because there was no going home from it. It was a gradual change that then became my daily life until I started to shed him after we stopped shooting, which actually didn’t happen for three or four weeks.

And I remember waking up one morning and knowing that he was gone and I just knew it. He was just gone from me. … I could just feel it — that he wasn’t there. It sounds so crazy, but I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t happening. I remember telling somebody, “Yeah, he’s gone.” And I remember somebody looking at me in the eyes and saying, “Yeah, I don’t see him anymore.”

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Bradley Cooper On Controversial Role Of Chris Kyle In American Sniper