“Your voice is everything as an actor,” Bradley Cooper told the New York Times recently, while explaining why he painstakingly took his own down an octave to play an alcoholic musician in A Star Is Born. “It’s everything. It’s everything. And if you’re not connected to your voice, it’s over. It’s impossible. It’s like plugging in the electrical cord to truth, right?”
Coincidentally, “an electrical cord plugged in to the truth” is also a fitting description of Cooper’s Star Is Born voice, a croak so low it’s practically in Death Valley. Here’s a clip so you can experience it yourself.
Chills, right? Though it’s tempting to say that this voice is like nothing else, it is in fact like a lot of things. Here are 20 things Bradley Cooper’s Star Is Born voice sounds like.
• Sam Elliott’s voice. (This is a plot point in the movie!)
• A pickup truck carefully reversing down a gravel road.
• A bullfrog with vocal fry.
• Carefully opening an old door at your parents’ house in the hope that it won’t creak and wake everyone else up, but that makes it creak even louder.
• The crusty bits outside the lid of a maple syrup bottle.
• Asphalt slowly drying on a summer afternoon.
• A rope bridge in an Indiana Jones movie that’s being stretched to its breaking point, and you feel like a real bridge would have snapped by now but this is a movie so they’re really milking it.
• Someone who has the hiccups but is hoping you don’t notice.
• An anthropomorphic log cabin.
• SNL’s Colonel Angus if he was recovering from the same kind of throat cancer that struck Michael Douglas.
• Not the taste, more like the memory of whiskey?
• A Red Rider wagon that hasn’t left the garage in 17 years.
• What I imagine Don Turnbee from The Onion sounds like.
• How I talk when I’ve woken up at 5 a.m.
• How I talk when I’ve stayed out until 5 a.m.
• Trying to listen to a Beatles record to hear the hints that Paul is dead, but with a CCR album.
• Getting your boot stuck in mud, and when you try to pull it out, your foot comes out instead.
• The world’s most sunburned Tuvan throat singer.
• Someone who’s been upside down for 45 minutes.
• A burp that has a B.A. in English.
