Bradley Cooper Faces Criticism For Leonard Bernstein Portrayal

After Netflix dropped the trailer for Maestro on Tuesday (August 15th), many took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to express outrage over Bradley Cooper‘s prosthetic nose in the movie. Cooper portrays the famous conductor Leonard Bernstein in the biopic.

“Bradley Cooper should not be playing Leonard Bernstein. He should not be wearing a prosthetic nose. This is Jew-face & is as serous & offensive as Black-face or the racialising of other minorities,” author Ben Freeman wrote.

Another user commented, “Bradley Cooper really needs to fix this and apologize bc what was he thinking??? Did anyone tell him that this is horribly antisemitic?”

One person brought up the fact that Jake Gyllenhaal, whose mother is Jewish, was also working on a project about Bernstein but lost the rights to Cooper. “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? and now he’s wearing prosthetic nose to play a jewish man and directing it himself,” the X user wrote.

Following this backlash, Bernstein’s three children released a statement to X saying that they have no issue with Cooper using “makeup to amplify his resemblance” and that they are “also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.”