In The Little Mermaid, Ariel trades in her voice for a pair of legs. In his directorial debut A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper may have traded in his own voice for an Oscar.
This seems evident in clips released on Thursday for the upcoming music drama.
While Lady Gaga shed her platinum hair, makeup and general pop icon aesthetic to play scrappy up-and-coming singer Ally, Cooper didn't change his look too much to portray fading star Jackson Maine, save for growing out a beard. Instead, he opted for obtaining an entirely new voice, one that will leave you wondering: "Is Bradley Cooper's voice actually dubbed?"
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Close your eyes and you'll never be able to place this voice as belonging to the Hangover star — not when he sings on stage, and not when he tells Ally that her nose really is very beautiful during a flirting session in a bar. It's just that different. Really.
Obviously, this was no accident. (Cooper did not catch a sexy-voice-making cold, a la Phoebe Buffay.) The actor told Entertainment Weekly:
"I knew I wanted to lower my speaking voice an octave, so I hired [dialect coach] Tim Monich early on — I mean, like, a year before we shot the movie. He moved to L.A. and we worked five days a week, four hours a day on exercises and lowering my voice. It was brutal, and it took months and months and months."
He added that it was his Star Is Born co-star Sam Elliott, who plays Jackson's brother Bobby, that inspired Jackson's way of speaking.
"I didn’t want [Jackson] to be only a country musician and I didn’t want him to have an accent. Sam grew up in California and his mother is from Texas, so it’s kind of this great hybrid voice."
A Star Is Born is not the first time that the actor made his voice virtually unrecognizable. Cooper also changed his voice in order to portray Rocket Racoon in the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise.
"It's Gilbert Gottfried meets Joe Pesci," Cooper told The Ellen Show in 2017 of who inspired that particular vocal change.
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A Star Is Born hits theaters October 5, 2018.