New Line Cinema
Long before he was directing awards-bait prestige dramas about legendary American composers and starring in upcoming Steven Spielberg projects, Bradley Cooper was perhaps best known for playing that jerk boyfriend in 2005’s Wedding Crashers (the character’s name was Sack Lodge, by the way).
Back then, Cooper was just a relatively nameless supporting actor, while Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson were the A-list stars of the project.
As such, Cooper recently recalled learned from Vince Vaughn’s willingness to “fail” while making the film, which is a comment that some on social media have perceived as being a backhanded compliment.
“Watching Vince Vaughn…this huge tough guy, funniest guy, quickest guy… I was just in awe of this human, this man just failing, just willing to try anything. At some point he was just scatting and caught onto this thing and was doing this song. I loved seeing it, but clearly it wasn’t working,” Cooper said.
“But it didn’t even matter. It was all of us watching this artist just explore with complete abandon. It was like a diamond through the middle of my head going, ‘That’s it! That freedom to just be absolutely willing to fail.’ It changed me forever. That was the moment,” he explained.
While Cooper is obviously trying to pay Vaughn a compliment, the internet has taken his comments as a slight diss towards Vaughn, as evidenced by this viral tweet.
It’s a compliment but film twitter cannot read so yeah https://t.co/DpAfmH6TUH
— 𝙍𝙤𝙡𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙤 𝙅𝙖𝙮 𝙁𝙖𝙡𝙘𝙤𝙣 (3-0)🍊 (@rolandojfalcon) February 1, 2024
A few years after Wedding Crashers, Cooper would start in another defining 2000s comedy, The Hangover, which would spawn two sequels. From there, Cooper would go on to become one of Hollywood’s leading A-list actors thanks to roles in films such as The Place Beyond the Pines, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, Guardians of the Galaxy, and American Sniper, before going on to direct and star in A Star Is Born.