Bradley Cooper Found Acting Inspirado By Watching Vince Vaughn Improv His Way Through ‘Wedding Crashers’

Bradley Cooper has been developing a reputation for actorly seriousness – and maybe even, with the release of Maestro, taking a little bit of a beating for it. But during a recent SAG-AFTRA event, when each Best Actor nominee was asked to name a career-changing on-set experience with another performer, Cooper called back to his comedy roots. No, he didn’t go to one of his first roles, in Wet Hot American Summer, but rather his experience on the 2005 comedy Wedding Crashers, highlighting co-star Vince Vaughn’s willingness to fail.

It’s not the backhanded compliment it sounds like. Cooper was talking about Vaughn trying different takes and, presumably, improvisations, undaunted by the idea that some of his ideas might not work – and indeed, as Cooper described, sometimes they didn’t. But he saw an actor willing to “explore with complete abandon,” and the moment hit him hard.

Besides a neat shout-out to Vaughn’s comic skill in the middle of frequently serious-minded Oscar season, Cooper’s answer is a little moment of redemption for improvisation, a comic technique that became all the rage in the back half of the 2000s, thanks in large part to the one-two punch of Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. As any comic filmmaker will tell you, even the most improv-heavy successful comedies tend to start from a solid script, which gives the actors more freedom to experiment with alternate lines or different takes. The idea that a movie could plug Owen Wilson or Vince Vaughn into something uninspired or half-finished and wind up with comic gold is exactly why so many movies have failed despite gifted improvisers – and therefore creating a kind of stigma around the idea of improv in movies.

But it doesn’t have to be this way! Improv has its place – it essentially created Seth Rogen’s acting career, for one thing – and has inspired plenty of truly excellent work, especially though not limited to the comic performances the Academy likes to ignore. If you’ve already seen Wedding Crashers, here are five more seemingly improv-heavy performances that you might want to check out in honor of Vince Vaughn’s moment of revelation for B-Coop:

1. Bill Murray in Kingpin

   Murray is known for improvising dialogue; there are plenty of moments throughout Groundhog Day, Ghostbusters, and any number of cameos where he riffs within a scene rather than following a clear blueprint. But according to the Farrelly Brothers, Murray supplied most of his own dialogue while shooting the role of Ernie McCracken, the villain of their bowling comedy Kingpin. Is it mostly just classic Murray shtick? Sure, and on the bright side: it’s classic Murray shtick, which very much does feel like it helps to define the particular kind of smarmy bad guy Ernie is.

   Where to stream KINGPIN

3. Olivia Wilde and Jake Johnson in Drinking Buddies

   Mumblecore was an indie-film movement in the 2000s that involved naturalistic settings, performances, and dialogue, generally oriented around the experience of being young and, if not necessarily inarticulate, maybe not entirely forthright about your feelings, either. The scene spawned filmmakers including the Duplass Brothers, Andrew Bujalski, Greta Gerwig, and Joe Swanberg, who have all used different elements of those early films in their later, more polished efforts. Swanberg is the director who has stuck the closest to the mumblecore ethos over the years, even when he moved up to bigger stars, and Drinking Buddies is probably his peak: A largely improvised sort-of-romantic sort-of-comedy about two close friends (Wilde and Johnson) who work at a brewery, and feel perpetually on the verge of something more, even when they’re both in other relationships. Romantic chemistry is difficult to fake; if your leads don’t have it, there’s not much you can do to gin it up from nowhere. Drinking Buddies understands and benefits from the happier flipside: If chemistry is there (and Johnson seems like one of the more chemistry-friendly comic leading men out there, for a certain type of gal), you don’t necessarily need tightly scripted banter to tease it out. The natural dialogue that Johnson and Wilde share in Drinking Buddies makes the tension between them all the more combustible, because it’s never forced out by a screenwriter’s heavy nudge.

   Where to stream Drinking buddies

4. Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man

   Though the Marvel Cinematic Universe is given a lot of – probably too much – credit for planning big events out in advance, the whole thing was kickstarted by a whole lot of ad-libbing. Faced with uncertainty over the script for Iron Man, Downey worked with director Jon Favreau, as well as writers, to play around with various scenes and pieces of dialogue, which doubtless lent his first performance as Tony Stark a spontaneity that had previously been confined to villains in superhero movies, not the main guy. Even the movie’s famous final moment, where Tony Stark admits his identity as Iron Man to the world, was a Downey on-set inspiration that stuck in – and changed the whole damn movie universe.

   where to stream iron man

5. Eddie Murphy in Bowfinger

   Murphy has been humble about his work in Bowfinger, talking about what a great piece of writing he had in Steve Martin’s screenplay and saying he doesn’t remember much improvising. But others who worked on the movie have pointed out that Murphy did a lot of improvisation in his dual role as action star Kit Ramsey and his nerdy brother Jiff – not least because Kit was originally written as more of a spacey Keanu Reeves type than a fast-talking Murphy type. While you might expect most of the improv in the movie to come from Kit’s increasing paranoia (supposedly his rant about the kind of role that might win him an Oscar was Murphy’s creation), he also did great deep-character work as Jiff. In the scene where Steve Martin’s title character interviews Jiff for a movie job, Martin and director Frank Oz apparently threw questions out to Murphy without warning, and he responded in-character – a comic exercise that yielded big laughs and genuine characterization for Jiff, making him perhaps the most lovable guy in the movie.

   where to stream bowfinger

6. Ensemble in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

   Where to stream anchorman: THE LEGEND OF RON BURGUNDY

   Adam McKay, along with Judd Apatow, bears a lot of responsibility for sweatily obvious improv moments making their way into a lot of late-2000s studio comedies. But McKay himself has extensive experience as an improviser, and though of course he and Ferrell did write what was by all accounts a very funny script for Anchorman, it’s the newsteam’s willingness to throw out other suggestions and riff together that makes the movie, which could have been so patchy and uncertain from then-first-timer McKay, an uproarious good time.

Now where’s Ron Burgundy’s SAG-AFTRA roundtable?!

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.