BRADLEY Cooper stars in “Burnt”
THREE Hollywood A-listers—Bradley Cooper, Keanu Reeves and Benicio Del Toro—get to sink their teeth into meaty parts in a trio of new movies.
An Oscar nominee (for “American Sniper” and “Silver Linings Playbook” for best actor and “American Hustler” for best supporting actor), Cooper plays a rock star chef whose career hit the skids in the drama flick “Burnt.”
Playing a chef is nothing new to Cooper, who was in the cast of the TV series “Kitchen Confidential.” He also grew up cooking all the time with his grandmother, he revealed in several interviews.
“I worked for most of my life as a cook,” he recalled. “When I was 15, I was a busboy in a Greek restaurant and then I worked as a prep cook through college.”
He recounted: “My mother’s side is Italian, so I grew up cooking all the time with my grandmother. Thank God the role was a chef, because I didn’t have much time to prep. There’s no stunt double. Everything in there, I’m cooking.”
Reeves, on the other hand, portrays a family man who strays in “Knock, Knock.”
KEANU Reeves in “Knock, Knock”
Directed and written by Eli Roth, “Knock, Knock” is described by drumbeaters as an erotic thriller, a “Fatal Attraction” for the social media generation.
Fragile world
“I wanted to show just how fragile the world we spend a lifetime building [is] … . What if you did everything right … and still, you have the sinking feeling you’re missing out on something,” Roth explained. “What if you wanted to tempt fate just for one night, thinking you could get away with it? I wanted the audience to sympathize with Keanu’s character, and to secretly make the same choices he would make.”
Speaking of choices, Oscar winner (best supporting actor for “Traffic”) Del Toro plays a conflicted character in “Sicario”—a former prosecutor who becomes an assassin after a family tragedy.
BENICIO Del Toro in “Sicario”
“It’s a movie about choices,” Del Toro pointed out. “It’s tough to say whether any character in ‘Sicario’ is truly good or bad. Do the means justify the ends? What happens when you go into a situation where you want to kill one guy and you kill 20 innocent people? You got the bad guy, but at what cost?”
“Sicario” opens on Oct. 7 and “Burnt” on Oct. 28, both from Pioneer Films, while “Knock, Knock” opens on Oct. 14 from OctoArts Films International.