https://www.youtube.com/embed/s1G5E5Eo1wo
It's always fun to find the through lines in an actor's career. They're sometimes entirely imagined or circumstantial or more meaningful to observers than they are to the actual performers, but hey, still fun! So walk back with us now 10 years to a 30-year-old Bradley Cooper fresh off the success of playing Ur-Douche Sack Lodge in Wedding Crashers. He was still years out from The Hangover and just about to get off the Alias train for good when he appeared in the one-season wonder Kitchen Confidential on Fox (co-starring Nicholas Brendan!). The show was based on Anthony Bourdain's book of the same name, and Cooper starred in it as Jack Bourdain, a hard-living, drug-addicted rockstar young chef given the chance to take over a major Manhattan restaurant and stage a career comeback.
So here we are now, in 2015, and Cooper is playing Adam Jones a hard-living, drug-addicted rockstar young chef given the chance to take over a major London restaurant and stage a career comeback. Kapow! Burnt is a had-it-all lost-it-all story, and the biggest differences between his new movie and his cancelled TV show seem to be that Adam Jones is also wanted by some people who will kill him if he starts working restaurants again, which feels extreme, and he's chasing his white whale third Michelin star, which is also extreme. But no matter! Cooper is coming off his third Oscar nomination and thanks to his acumen for picking boffo directors with strong signature styles, he's on a fantastic hot streak. Burnt looks to continue Cooper's run of playing characters with big mood swings that give him a lot of room to stretch on screen, and we like the guy's moxy. Co-stars include Uma Thurman, Sienna Miller, global treasure Emma Thompson, Daniel Brühl and 2015 MVP candidate Alicia Vikander, so Burnt is looking like an exciting proposition indeed.
Pause at: 0:30. Did they have to make the Bad Boy Chef this kind of obvious? We definitely want this kind of Bad Boy Chef at 1:03, though. Wondering what's going on at 1:26.
Essential Quote: "I don't want my restaurant to be a place where you come and eat. I want people to sit at that table and be sick with longing."—Adam Jones (Cooper)
