Bradley Cooper took a quick break from Broadway to hit the publicity trail for American Sniper, which opens in wide release on Friday. He wore shorty shorts for the movie and gained 40 pounds of muscle. His buddies are talking him up for an Oscar, and he’s hitting the creepy magazine covers hard. The problem with chasing an Oscar — and make no mistake, Bradley is chasing — is that it often involves heavy subject matter. In this case, Bradley played Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in American military history.

BCoop studied up with Kyle’s widow, Kyla. They did a featurette together for Warner Bros. Kyla is still amazed at how Bradley never met Chris Kyle (although they talked once on the phone), but he managed to nail several uncanny gestures. Even “the sniff” in this trailer was authentic. BCoop sat down with Matt Lauer to talk about his role. You can see the video here, but the gist is how Bradley doesn’t see himself as handsome:

When Chris Kyle, the man whose life the movie “American Sniper” is based on, first found out that Bradley Cooper would play him on the big screen, he had just one reservation about the star People magazine once dubbed its Sexiest Man Alive — that Cooper might just be too handsome for the job.

“I’m going to have to tie him to my truck, drag him down the street and knock some of the pretty off of him,” the Navy SEAL joked at the time.

But in a Tuesday morning visit to TODAY, Cooper assured Matt Lauer that handsomeness has never really been a problem for him.

“The first job I’ve ever got was on Alias, and I was not the … good-looking guy,” he insisted. “I was the sidekick, best friend. And in Wedding Crashers, I was the jerk. So, no, I never sort of suffered that ‘oh, he’s too handsome’ [problem] ever.”

Unfortunately, Kyle never got to see the full transformation for himself, as he died from a gunshot wound in 2013. But Kyle’s close friend, Clint Bruce, watched the film, and he had high praise for Cooper’s portrayal of the man who worked overwatch for marines in Iraq during the war.

“There were three or four times during the movie where I literally just forgot I was watching an actor,” Bruce told NBC’s Lester Holt. “I thought I was watching Chris.”

[From Today]

I can’t believe Matt Lauer asked Bradley whether his “looks and charm” had ever cripped his career. What a weird question, right? Bradley says only the People’s Sexiest Man title clued him into his handsomeness. Come on! Bradley isn’t classically handsome, but the ladies did chase him a few years ago. He was Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor.

Anyway. Clint Eastwood talked about how Sniper is a case study of marriages in the military, which I find interesting. People tend to romanticize happy reunions for these families. That’s what we see on the nightly news and in dog food commercials. The soldier comes home, and everything goes back to normal, right? Well … it’s complicated. Even without serious issues like PTSD, reacclimation is rough. Chris Kyle came home and went straight to a bar. This film sounds intense for more reasons than one.

Photos courtesy of Pacific Coast News & WENN