14 DAY TRIAL // The role in “American Sniper” earned Bradley Cooper his second Best Actor Oscar nomination and warm praise online for being able to deliver a terrific performance despite having to play around with a fake plastic baby, while pretending it was the real thing.
In the film, Cooper’s Chris Kyle is shown holding his newborn son on a couple of occasions. The scenes are very short, but they still managed to get a lot of attention online. In the week of the film’s release, the fake plastic baby, which was so obviously fake and ridiculous looking, became the talk of Twitter.
Buzz around the prop reached such levels that even one of the producers on the film felt the need to address it: there were no real babies to be had on the day of the shoot, he said. One was sick and the replacement never showed up, so they did their best in this situation.
As it turns out, even Cooper was astounded to find out he would act the scenes with a plastic doll, as he admits in a new interview with Ellen DeGeneres for her show (video below).
He says that the idea to wiggle the doll’s hand with his thumb was his and that he was actually proud of it because it saved the studio about $100,000 (€88,109) in effects: they would no longer need to CGI the hand movement.
Co-star Sienna Miller, with whom Cooper reteams on “Burnt,” was equally amused by it on her appearance on the show too, which took place some days before Cooper’s.
Fake plastic baby, #NeverForget.
