Bradley Cooper and Will Arnett: How We Pulled Off Is This Thing On?

One year ago, when Bradley Cooper turned 50, he gathered with Jeremy Strong and a few other close friends (who will remain anonymous) at his West Village home to do a table-read workshop of his new film. It was an unconventional way to celebrate a milestone birthday, but as everyone who has known or worked with the actor turned director will report, once a creative idea takes hold, he’s hard-pressed to put it down.

In this case, the project was Is This Thing On?, an indie dramedy about a middle-aged couple facing a divorce, eventually starring Laura Dern and Will Arnett (he lent his part, ever so briefly, to Strong on the night of the table read).

The script started with Arnett, who had heard the fascinating origin story about U.K. comic John Bishop — he took the stage at an open mic night to avoid paying the bar’s cover charge and discovered a knack for telling comedic stories about his divorce — and teamed up with Mark Chappell to write a version of the story. Cooper was in the middle of making Maestro when Arnett first mentioned the script. “I was just trying to survive [the shoot] and not even thinking about what I could make next, but I got this image of Will in that movie and couldn’t get it out of my head,” says Cooper. “So I asked him, ‘Would you be open to me coming in and doing this with you?’ It was like an itch that just got in me.”

Cooper and Arnett had worked together before, with small parts in the mid-aughts comedies The Rocker and The Comebacks, but they first met decades ago at Peter McManus Cafe in Manhattan. “I was going to meet my ex, Amy [Poehler], and I walked in and Bradley was there with Janeane Garofalo,” says Arnett. “I didn’t realize at the beginning what the objective of the evening was, and then it was like, ‘Oh wait, I’m being vetted.’ ” The two became fast friends, even living together in Los Angeles’ Venice neighborhood a few years later (right across from Dennis Hopper, no less), and by 2024 they’d become extremely close.

When they decided to partner on Is This Thing On?, Cooper knew he wanted to build a creative team of other close friends. He tapped Weston Middleton, a collaborator since he was Cooper’s PA on 2009’s All About Steve, to produce. He re-upped his partnership with Matthew Libatique, who was director of photography on all of Cooper’s films (after an initial referral from JenniferLawrence, who’d worked with Libatique on mother!). Ozark‘s Peter Thorell joined as first AD by way of Arnett’s SmartLess co-host Jason Bateman; Sean Hayes and his husband, Scott Icenogle, also appear in the film, a casting decision that came out of a hang session with Arnett and Cooper.

“In the original script, stand-up comedy was the A story and the relationship was the B story, but the last thing I wanted to do was make a fictionalized version of what it’s like to be a stand-up comic,” says Cooper. “There are so many good documentaries about that already.” He wanted to shift the story’s perspective and put Arnett’s fictional wife more front and center — and he knew he needed to lean on another old friend for that.

“I was standing in Bradley’s kitchen about a year before we actually made the movie, and he started describing this script of Will’s that he’d read,” says Dern. “He told me, ‘The relationship should be the core of this movie, and we haven’t found it yet, and we’d need you to join us to be able to find it.’ ” Dern said yes on the spot and spent the next months consulting with Cooper to build out her character, a former Olympic volleyball player who is struggling to find her own identity in marriage and motherhood.

While Dern was fleshing out the relationship (and taking volleyball lessons), Arnett was working on stand-up. Cooper had asked comedian (and friend, of course) Shane Gillis for early notes, and Gillis suggested that Arnett start going onstage for live sets, eventually ceding 10 minutes of his own headlining show in Austin. Later, as they were scouting locations in New York, the manager of the Comedy Cellar persuaded Arnett to go onstage. “I knew I’d have to do a few sets to practice, but I wound up going up every night for six weeks, which I never could have imagined,” says Arnett.

By the time they started principal photography in the spring, the small, sub-$10 million project that Cooper initially envisioned became considerably larger. “Since the story is so intimate, we realized we needed certain parts of it to feel epic, to add gravitas,” says Middleton, adding that their partnership with Searchlight helped blow out the movie. They decided to lean in to place, filming not only at the Comedy Cellar but around the West Village and even in Grand Central Station. “As the mayor’s office kept telling us, New York City is a luxury product,” Middleton says, laughing.

Cooper was still deeply inspired by the image of Arnett — onstage, in front of a mic, with an extreme close-up shot — that came to him on the first day he heard about Is This Thing On?, so he decided to join the cinematographers union and do a large amount of the filming himself (alongside camera operator Scott Sakamoto). “I loved that I was low on the totem pole and that I had to get everybody’s respect,” he says of the gig. Adds Libatique, “We’re a handheld movie, and Bradley and Will are about the same height, so that also gave us a great advantage.” Cooper borrowed a technique he learned from David O. Russell and had ongoing conversations with his actors as he held the camera in their faces. “The postproduction sound guys came up with the term DBC, which meant to take Bradley’s voice out of the dialogue,” Middleton says with a laugh about the de-Bradley-Cooper-ifying.

On A Star Is Born, they’d learned that getting the hardest scenes out of the way first, such as shooting all of the concert footage at the beginning, gave them great momentum. This time, the team decided that it would be critical to film all of the Comedy Cellar scenes upfront, starting with Arnett’s open mic nights and working their way up to a pivotal moment that sees Dern’s character accidentally watching his set about sleeping with another woman. Dern took a red-eye flight from the 2025 Oscars ceremony to make it in time for her first day. “That was in my top two in terms of jumping right in, alongside having to huff paint on day one of Citizen Ruth,” she says. “But we’d already done so much work and prep together that I knew exactly where we were supposed to be in that scene. We’re watching this woman, in real time, see her entire marriage flash before her eyes.”

The movie’s opening and closing scenes take place at the couple’s children’s school, and Cooper decided to use his daughter’s real-life auditorium in the West Village. The intro features a slumped-over, dejected Arnett oblivious to the delights of the students’ Chinese New Year celebration going on around him and was inspired by an assembly he attended. “It wasn’t to that degree, but I saw parents on their phones as this group performed, and I thought it was so fascinating that there was something so majestic happening and it seemed like no one even knew it was happening,” says Cooper. The crew gathered 300 of his daughter’s schoolmates as extras, using a bar across the street and several city buses to hold the “actors” as they loaded into the school building.

Cooper originally wrote the ending around a school band performance of “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” — as their kids played, Dern would lean over to Arnett and say, “Don’t stop believing, baby.” But he couldn’t shake the sense that The Sopranos had already used the famous song to an inimitable degree. Dern eventually sent him a video of Eddie Vedder and Ben Harper performing “Under Pressure” live onstage, and something clicked. He rewrote the final scene, and as a result, the film’s entire score of percussive notes became based around the song.

“We’d often get breakfast burritos together before going to set, and we’d be walking through the Village and Bradley would just start singing a doom ba dum, and I was like, oh, he’s locking in on ‘Under Pressure,’ ” says Arnett. But for the director, it went deeper than the catchy tune. “I love that David Bowie and Freddie Mercury are two voices that should not be complementary in a duet, but they’re so different that they work perfectly,” Cooper says. “That’s how so much of a relationship can be. I wanted an emotionally compelling ending that feels hopeful but doesn’t say that they’re definitively back together. It’s a moment of hope, but they are under pressure.”

This story appeared in the Jan. 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.