Bradley Cooper's Prosthetic Nose Doesn't Go Over Well

On Tuesday, Netflix dropped a trailer for Maestro, a biopic about West Side Story conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein that's headed to theaters on Nov. 22 and to the streaming platform the following month. Netflix plugs the film as a "towering and fearless love story" and "a love letter to life and art," but all of that is now being overshadowed by the appearance of star Bradley Cooper in the title role. What stood out to viewers: the fake nose worn by Cooper, who also co-wrote, produced, and directed the film, per NBC News.

Outcry immediately emerged from those who called the use of the prosthesis antisemitic and an example of "Jewface," as Bernstein was Jewish; Cooper is not. "I saw Bradley [C]ooper play the elephant man with no prosthetics on broadway. But then he plays a Jew and decides he needs a huge nose?" one detractor wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, adding that blame couldn't be passed up the film's ladder, as Cooper is also the director of Maestro.

The Media Diversity Institute notes the image of "a large, hooked nose" tied to Jewish people is one "so deeply imbedded in modern culture, that most do not acknowledge that it is actually a deeply antisemitic stereotype." The site says Jewish people weren't shown as having overly large noses until the 1930s, when Nazi propaganda took hold and made it a "common trope." In an Instagram post, British actor Tracy-Ann Oberman says Cillian Murphy didn't wear a phony proboscis for his role as Jewish theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and neither did Tom Conti as his Jewish colleague Albert Einstein.

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"If Bradley Cooper can't do it through the power or acting alone then don't cast him—get a Jewish Actor," Oberman wrote, adding that sporting a nose like that is akin to wearing blackface or "yellowface," per the Times of Israel. Others noted that Cooper's prosthesis didn't even look like Bernstein's real nose. The Independent reports that actor Jake Gyllenhaal, whose mother is Jewish, had originally been a contender to make a movie about Bernstein. "That idea of playing one of the most preeminent Jewish artists in America and his struggle with his identity was in my heart for 20 some odd years, but sometimes those things don't work out," he told Deadline in a 2021 interview. (More here on "Hollywood's 'Jewface' problem.")