Actor Bradley Cooper declared Monday that his role as slain Navy SEAL Chris Kyle in Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper” has completely changed his life.
Speaking at the annual Oscar Nominees Luncheon in Beverly Hills, Mr. Cooper marveled at the film’s success after it beat out “Saving Private Ryan” for the highest-grossing war movie of all time, the Huffington Post reported.
“You never know when you make a movie if anybody’s going to see it,” said Mr. Cooper, who is nominated for best actor. “So to have the audacity to think that it would cause any sort of effect would be pretty presumptuous … but you hope people are going to watch it and hope that it has some impact.”
“The responsibility to play a human being when his family is still alive and it’s still fresh was a huge endeavor and something that I knew was going to be important. I treated it in way I hadn’t before,” he said.
“I just really loved this story,” Mr. Cooper continued, the Post reported. “And it’s changed over the years. He was murdered a year and a half into our development, and it changed everything. It became a different movie. It became more about the plight of the soldier and his family.”
The 40-year-old actor said he was unsure if he even fully understood what effect this film had on him.
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“I don’t think I’ll realize it fully until maybe later in my life,” he said. “It was life changing. Completely.”
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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