Bradley Cooper inspired by Gordon Ramsay for new 'Burnt' role
The heat in the kitchen just went up a notch thanks to Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller, who star opposite each other in the foodie film Burnt, which is released in the US on Friday. And it seems that Bradley, who plays world-famous chef and recovering drug addict eager to regain his reputation by winning three Michelin stars, had plenty of experience in restaurants that set him in good stead for the role.
"When I was a kid I would screw up cooking with my grandmother. It was an Italian family, so cooking was a huge part of it," the actor tells Yahoo! Movies. "I was a busboy at a Greek restaurant and a prep cook at an [Italian] restaurant called Mirabella's in Somers Point, New Jersey. I’d be there from 6:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., just cooking."
Speaking of his role for the film, he reveals that he took inspiration for Adam Jones from three of Britain's most popular celebrity chefs: "I created a guy I see as a mixture of the three guys I studied: Marcus Wareing, Gordon Ramsay, and Marco Pierre White.
"He's a combination. Little things he does, physical things, are basically things I stole from all three of those guys."
Marcus Wareing, of the two-Michelin star restaurant Marcus in London, developed and prepared all the recipes for the film but when the cameras were rolling Bradley had to step up the plate.
"There's no cooking double for Adam Jones," says the American Sniper actor. "Everything in the movie I'm actually doing. The stakes were high," he says. "Every day I felt the pressure of having to deliver."
Bradley wasn't the open one who prepped for the film – director John Wells spent up to 18-hours a day in Michelin-star restaurants and consulted with Marcus, Gordon and Mario Batali.
Sienna, who stars as Adam's sous chef, also spent several weeks training with Marcus, whom she calls "one of the greatest chef in the world."
The man responsible for setting the scene in the kitchen and making the actors life-like, told Bonappetit.com how he did it: "I made [them] cook. I made them chop things, butcher things, do all of that. And as they did it over and over and over again, they got tired, they got hot, they got frustrated – they started to look like chefs. It’s brilliant.
Marcus adds: "The hotter the set got, the more they looked like chefs."
