Following a successful Broadway run, Bradley Cooper is set to play The Elephant Man on the London stage later this year.
The actor, Oscar-nominated for his performances in the films American Hustle and Silver Linings Playbook, told talkshow host Jimmy Fallon:
“We’re going to do it til 22 February, and then I think we’re going to take it to London — bring it back home for the summer for 12 weeks. We’re working on it now, but I think it’s going to work out. We’re going to take the whole company, too. Everybody.”
That means his co-stars Alessandro Nivola (singled out as “excellent” in a New York Times review) and Patricia Clarkson will also feature. A theatre hasn’t yet been confirmed for the production, but two anonymous production sources confirmed the plans with Deadline, saying it would begin in April.
The Elephant Man, written in 1979 by Bernard Pomerance, focuses on John Merrick, whose physical deformities have made him a figure of ghoulish fascination in a travelling freak show, before a surgeon attempts to give him a more normal life. Cooper has played Merrick twice before, in graduate school and in a 2012 production in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
In a review for the Guardian of his current New York performance, Alexis Soloski wrote that Cooper “gives a bravura performance and occasionally quite a moving one.” The New York Times was a little more lukewarm, saying: “It is a strenuous role, for sure, demanding a hunched, muscle-taxing posture for the play’s duration... But once that pose is struck, much of the actor’s work is done.” Either way, it has been a big success, becoming the first production at the Booth theatre to gross over a million dollars in a week.
Cooper can soon be seen in the Clint Eastwood-directed American Sniper, out 16 January in the UK, while later in the year he’ll take the lead in an as-yet untitled movie from Cameron Crowe.
