Maestro: First trailer shows Bradley Cooper as legendary composer Leonard Bernstein

The first trailer for Maestro has been released, giving viewers a teaser of Bradley Cooper’s portrayal of Leonard Bernstein.

Maestro will tell the life story of the seminal American composer, known to many for creating the music for the hit musical West Side Story with lyricist Stephen Sondheim. The film will centre on the decades-long love he shared with his wife, Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein (Carey Mulligan).

Its official description reads: “A love letter to life and art, Maestro at its core is an emotionally epic portrayal of family and love.”

As well as lead actor, Cooper is also the co-writer and director for this film, which includes Hollywood heavyweights Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg among its producers.

The trailer, released on Tuesday (15 August), shows Cooper and Mulligan as Leonard and Felicia at different ages, complete with aged-up makeup and prosthetics.

In the clip, scenes switch from black-and-white in their earlier ages, to colour when they’re older.

Though he married Felicia in 1951, aged 33, Bernstein had relationships with men until he died of a heart attack in 1990 at 72. The trailer hints at Bernstein’s queer identity by showing a brief moment in which Felicia catches him in an intimate position in a hallway with another man.

In an interview in January, Cooper referred to portraying the composer as being the “hardest thing” he’s had to do, in terms of perfecting the stance of someone leading an orchestra.

“Having worked on a project in the same world [as Tár], the level of respect that I have for that world and that podium, it is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced,” he told Cate Blanchett, who portrayed a fearsome classical conductor in Tár.

“And it’s so odd because so many people – I don’t know if you’ve come across this – but people that I have in the last five years have said, ‘Well, what is it that conductors even do? Aren’t you up there sort of doing like this?’

“And my answer is, ‘It’s the absolute hardest thing you could ever want to do. It is impossible.’”

Last year, when the first image of Cooper as Bernstein hit the internet, some criticised the use of a prosthetic nose as an unnecessary antisemitic trope, and the practice of non-Jewish actors portraying Jewish characters or real-life figures.

In a piece for Indy Voices in 2022, Noah Berlatsky wrote: “Using prosthetics to emphasize the physical difference between Cooper and Bernstein effectively turns Jewish people into their physical characteristics. It makes us caricatures.”

Maestro will be in select UK cinemas on 24 November 2023 and on Netflix from 20 December 2023.