Bradley Cooper in “War Dogs”; image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures(NEW YORK) — Bradley Cooper looks very different than his “Sexiest Man Alive” days in the new film, War Dogs, in which he plays an arms dealer.
The actor said he played up the fact that his “eyes get red normally” to achieve his character’s bloodshot look. It was the movie’s director, Todd Phillips, who provided the inspiration for the distinct glasses worn by Cooper’s character.
“I remember I emailed Bradley a picture of Jeffrey Dahmer just for the glasses,” Phillips said on Thursday’s Good Morning America, referring to the infamous serial killer. “And I said, ‘He needs to wear these glasses.’”
Phillips also directed Cooper in The Hangover, a movie very different from War Dogs. While the former saw a group of buddies losing control in Las Vegas, War Dogs centers on two 20-somethings, played by Jonah Hill and Miles Teller, embroiled in a $300 million deal to arm the Afghan military.
Then again, Phillips said the two movies have more common than a viewer might at first think. “There’s a little bit of tonal shift but it’s ultimately still about guys making bad decisions,” he said. “Which all my movies seem to be about.”
Phillips wrote the film in addition to directing it and producing it, along with Cooper.
War Dogs is based on a factual 2011 Rolling Stone article titled “Arms and the Dudes,” written by Guy Lawson. Hill and Teller’s characters are living in Miami Beach during the Iraq War when they take advantage of a government initiative to bid on U.S. military contracts.
“There haven’t been a ton of movies made about the obscene amount of money that a very small group of people make off of war,” Phillips said.
War Dogs opens in theaters Friday.
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