Bradley Cooper is producing and directing Maestro, the Leonard Bernstein story. Apparently, it’s a role he’s coveted for a long time, but for reasons one can only speculate about, he felt it was impossible to play Bernstein without a large prosthetic nose. This is made all the more curious by the fact that Cooper played The Elephant Man on Broadway, in a production that demands the story of physical deformity be told with absolutely no prosthetics. Furthermore, Bernstein is famous for his music not his facial features. I personally had no idea what the man looked like for years. If you said, “Leonard Bernstein,” the only image I got was of his name in chalk on the brick wall credits of West Side Story, with the memory of a sandbag-sized lump in my throat only made larger by Bernstein’s soundtrack.
You won’t get an argument from anyone about why we no longer tape the eyelids back on white actors to play Charlie Chan, or why blackface is offensive. Productions of West Side Story are now cast with Puerto Rican actors and not white ones in heavy pancake makeup. This was settled long ago. However, the idea of a gentile actor portraying a Jew with a prosthetic nose for some reason creates a more ambiguous response, even within the Jewish community.
Unless you’re talking about some kind of avant-garde piece, actors are typically cast by type. Casting calls don’t invite all actors, they are very specific as to what gender, race, and age of actor they are seeking. There is nothing new about this.
The issue is further confused by some common misnomers about the art of acting itself. Acting is often described as “just pretending.” Well, just about every acting teacher in the world will tell you that acting is not pretending, it’s being. An actor strives to become a character. Cooper is a graduate of The Actor’s Studio where he would have surely been taught this.
I don’t think Cooper is antisemitic, but I do suspect there is some implicit bias in his choice to wear a fake nose. More importantly, he didn’t seem to understand what a tinderbox the nose was as an ancient antisemitic trope. If he doesn’t understand, then how can he become what he doesn’t know?
I’ve heard it suggested that if you cast Jews as Jews then only gentiles can play gentiles. The truth is the vast variety of roles doesn’t specify any race or ethnicity. For decades white, gentile actors have been the standard in casting because it was a reflection of mainstream culture. As the industry has become more inclusive, casting has become more diverse. Because Jews live in the dominant culture, they understand how to navigate in it. Even Jews who are not actors have been passing in gentile culture since arriving at Ellis Island. Non-Jews have not been afforded the same exposure to all things Jewish. It is more challenging to conjure a character with less knowledge, making the risk of stereotyping higher.
Recently in the Twin Cities, there was a production written by a well-known Jewish playwright. A non-Jewish actor with New York credits was brought in to play a Jewish role. As rehearsals progressed it became clear that the depiction was looking and sounding stereotypical. The solution to this was to take all Jewish references out of the character. That resulted in Jewish erasure from the piece. Something the Jewish playwright never intended. No Jew should be erased from their story.
If it is too much of a challenge for people to understand the value of Jewish representation as they would see it with any other minority group, then it should at least be recognized as an expertise. We’ve all heard of a Triple Threat: an actor who not only acts but sings and dances. Actors bring any kind of skill to a role. It can be stage combat training, it can be the ability to play a musical instrument. While some of these skills can be simulated for a role, or even trained for a role, it’s better when the actor comes equipped for the role. You can teach an actor to recite Yiddish with perfection, but it is far more difficult to train them on the emotion and inflection those words have when they were spoken by our grandparents. I understand that depending on location, there might not be a pool of Jewish performers to draw from, but it’s insulting to bypass a Jewish actor for a Jewish role when there is plenty of talent to choose from.
Art not only imitates life, it intersects it. Representation matters because when the Nazis showed up to opening night of Parade on Broadway, Jewish actor Ben Platt who was playing Leo Frank was able to make a statement about it as a Jew. If that had been an all-gentile cast, we as Jews would have been in their hands to defend or represent us and at such a moment, that doesn’t feel safe to me.
Some argue that representational casting limits actors. I would say it brings more actors to the tent and it makes performances more realistic. In Shakespeare’s time women were forbidden from taking the stage. When women were allowed to play the female roles, the plays became more believable. When we stopped impersonating Asians, we brought into the craft a whole community of Asian actors, widening the tent of performers without limiting opportunities for white actors. This has been true of every effort towards representational casting.
The saddest part of all this for me is Bernstein’s story deserves to be told. Whatever side of the argument you fall on, I would say Cooper has already failed in his charge to tell this story because his prosthetic is now the star of the show and likely the only thing most of the audience will be paying attention to, rather than his performance.
As a storyteller, I believe that we should be present in our own stories, and I believe audience members have the right to see themselves in their stories. I believe it is equally important for gentiles to see Jews tell their stories. Jews make up less than 2 percent of the population for many audience members so it is entirely likely that their only exposure to someone Jewish is going to be a character on the stage or screen. A stereotypical act can be dangerous to the community; a missed nuance is a missed opportunity. It’s not so much that a gentile can’t play a Jew, but when it comes to signature roles, like Bernstein or Brice, or Meir, every effort should be made to have Jews tell those stories because being Jewish was as intrinsic to those individuals as the noses on their faces.
Excellent piece. Spot on.
I’m not entirely sure what the main thrust of this article was. That Bradley Cooper shouldn’t have donned the artifical proboscis, or that non-Jewish actors shouldn’t portray Jewish characters? While the former was the stated theme, the latter is discussed with equal focus. While I have opinions on the latter, I’ll focus on the former.
There are a few reasons why I don’t agree with the writer’s assessment.
1. I don’t understand what trope is being perpetuated by the presence of the prosthesis. That Jews have big noses? Many Jews do have large noses, especially those of Eastern Europe who emigrated to America during the great migration of 1880-1920. It was a defining characteristic as much as the dark curly hair and in the same way that Scandinavians tend to be tall with blonde hair and blue eyes. When attacking perceived anti-semitic tropes, wouldn’t it be better to focus on the intention of the accused? If a Jew portrayed with a huge honker in a cartoon caricature is shown controlling world leaders or global finance with puppet strings, then, yes, that’s anti-semitic all day long; but if a non-Jewish actor is, by all accounts with love and respect, portraying a Jew known for having a legendary big nose, what’s the harm of portraying the nose in all its grandeur? Jimmy Durante was a generational, multi-talented performer AND had a gigantic nose. Bob Hope was a generational, multi-talented performer AND had a nose that resembled a ski-jump. Any portrayals of Durante or Hope that don’t acknowledge the unique shapes of their noses would not seem genuine. As for The Elephant Man, I may be way off, but the point of that story isn’t the disfigurement of the titular character, but rather, the inclusion of society’s outcasts in general (or lack thereof). I must admit, I’m not familiar with Bradley Cooper’s portrayal of the Elephant Man. Perhaps I’d be bothered by the lack of prosthetics, but that opinion would be but one facet of my overall judgment of the production as a whole, and Cooper’s acting in particular – in much the same way I rated the Guthrie Theatre’s production of Death of a Salesman that featured an all-black cast.
2. The statement released by Bernstein’s three children lauding Cooper’s performance is to me the most compelling argument that the furor over the prosthetic nose is much ado about nothing.
3. Speaking of much ado about nothing, I wasn’t aware that lack of believability was a criticism of Shakespeare’s all-male casts. I do know that the Bavarian village Oberammergau’s decennial production of The Passion Play (itself an anti-semitic bonanza!) featured the actual crucifixion of the actor playing the role of Jesus when it first premiered in the Middle Ages. Modern mores won’t allow for that level of character acting, but I’m sure the point still comes across ‐ not to mention “a cross” – clearly.
I respect the writer’s opinion, but in my opinion, I think we should save accusations of anti-semitism (or, in this case, prejudice) for examples that can and do perpetuate the libelous tropes that anti-semites use to demonize Jews – like that we engineer global pandemics, control (the list is long, fill in the blank), and that no country on earth commits more human rights violations than Israel, to name a few.
Thank you, Stacey Dinner-Levin, for the most rational article yet on the subject.