Bradley Cooper Receives Backlash for Prosthetic Nose in Maestro

The first trailer for Bradley Cooper's Maestro landed yesterday and was immediately met with controversy over the prosthetic nose Cooper adopted for the role of famous Jewish composer Leonard Bernstein.

In an interview with Deadline in 2021, it was revealed that Jake Gyllenhaal, whose mother is Jewish, lost the rights to Cooper for the Bernstein story. He told Deadline, "that idea of playing one of the most preeminent Jewish artists in America and his struggle with his identity was in my heart for 20 some odd years, but sometimes those things don't work out".

Produced by Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, Cooper's version follows the love story between Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre. The two were married for 27 years before Montealegre died in 1978.

Many people took to social media to share their discomfort that Cooper adopted a prosthetic nose to play a Jewish man. Frequently depicted and caricatured in anti-semitic imagery, Wikipedia shares that the "widespread stereotype can be traced back to the 13th century".

In an article for heyalma in 2022, Rebecca Long wrote, "It's surprising that no one behind the scenes of "Maestro" paused to consider the implications of putting a non-Jewish actor in these prosthetics", going on to say "Ethnicity is not a costume, not something to be conjured out of latex".