Bradley Cooper--The Hangover

Written by Dan Hudak |

Great guy movies are hard to come by, with many being pale imitators of the select few that are truly, genuinely hilarious. It remains to be seen if “The Hangover” really belongs in the “great” category, but star Bradley Cooper certainly had a doozy of a time making it.

Dan: This is the kind of movie a guy sees with his buddies, and then immediately afterward they start talking about how their experiences were better than what you guys go through in the movie. Have you been getting a lot of that?

Cooper: I’ve been doing press for about a week or so, and I’d say at least 20 people have come up to me and have been like, ‘Hey man, that’s exactly what happened to us!’ And I just think, really? You sure about that? You stole a tiger from Mike Tyson? And you found a baby? If so, you should be in jail. You really can’t surpass what happens to these guys.

So if you do “Hangover 2,” how would you top this?

I think you’d probably do something like go to space, maybe get drunk on moon juice. Maybe Doug gets captured by aliens.

Tell me about working with Tyson.

He was great. Growing up he was such an icon, so I was really intimidated the first day. But he just diffused the situation so fast, and it’s almost impossible for him to say something inauthentic. So he wound up being an essential part of the movie.

Did he look in shape to you? He seemed a bit round in the midsection to me.

No, I’d say he’s on hiatus from working out.

If Tyson wasn’t bad, what was the tiger like?

It was ridiculous. [Director] Todd Phillips insisted that the tiger be real, and really be in all those scenes. There were no visual effects at all, so all the stuff you see – walking the tiger, feeding him – that was actually what was happening on the set. And you can’t tame a tiger. I had to feed it at one point for one of the stills, and I had to put pressure on its mouth because they told me if I don’t keep pressure on the food it’ll try to grab it. It was crazy.

What part of shooting was the most fun?

It was all a blast, but it was hard. We felt like we did a war movie because we get the s&%t kicked out of us. And it was Vegas for a month and a half, living in a casino, arid weather, dusty. But the funnest part was shooting with Ed and Zach. You get lucky doing a movie sometimes, and everything just sort of works. We didn’t even need to do any reshoots, which is unheard of for a comedy.

I think this movie will be up there with “Old School” and the great guy movies of all-time. Obviously time will tell, but I genuinely think it’s that funny.

I actually think it’s better than “Old School” because it’s also a mystery and detective story. I love “Old School,” but the story gets lost a little bit; this movie moves like a speeding train, and it looks very cinematic, which shows Todd’s evolution as a filmmaker.

What do you want to do moving forward?

I just care about working with great filmmakers and great actors. It’s not necessarily the type of movie so much as it is who’s making the movie. The ideal is to be able to do theatre and film, and work with the best.