Bradley Cooper on filming naked scene in Nightmare Alley: ‘It was pretty heavy’

Bradley Cooper has revealed that shooting a nude scene in Nightmare Alley “was pretty heavy”.

The 47-year-old actor who stars as Stanton Carlisle in the 2021 film recalled his experience of filming an intimate scene with co-star Toni Collette.

Cooper told The Hollywood Reporter that he can still remember the day he had to shoot the nude scene in Guillermo Del Toro’s new film as it required him to be “naked in front of the crew for six hours”.

“I remember reading in the script and thinking, he’s a pickled punk in that bathtub and it’s to story. You have to do it,” the actor said. “I can still remember that day, just to be naked in front of the crew for six hours, and it was Toni Collette’s first day. It was just like, ‘whoa’. It was pretty heavy.”

Cooper said he never raised any questions or pushed back on the scene because “there was nothing gratuitous about it”.

Based on William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel, Nightmare Alley follows the story of Stan as he crafts a golden ticket to success by swindling the elite and wealthy in 1940s New York.

Hoping for a big score, he soon hatches a scheme to con a dangerous tycoon with help from a mysterious psychiatrist (Cate Blanchett’s Dr Lilith Ritter), who might be his most formidable opponent yet.

Nightmare Alley will be released in the UK on 21 January 2022.