Bradley Cooper has said that filming his nude scene in Nightmare Alley was “pretty heavy”.

The actor, who stars as Stanton Carlisle in Guillermo Del Toro’s new film, recalled filming the intimate scene (in which his character engages in a sexual act with Toni Collette’s character) and said it was a “big deal” because it was a career-first.

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“I remember reading in the script and thinking, he’s a pickled punk in that bathtub and it’s to story. You have to do it,” Cooper told The Hollywood Reporter. “I can still remember that day, just to be naked in front of the crew for six hours, and it was Toni Collette’s first day. It was just like, ‘Whoa.’ It was pretty heavy.”

The actor said he had agreed to do the scene and didn’t question it “because there was nothing gratuitous about it. It was to story.”

Praising Del Toro and the demands of Nightmare Alley in terms of the script, Bradley Cooper added: “Because the content of what the movie is, what we were exploring, in order to do it in a real way, it demanded that we’d be naked emotionally and soulfully.”

Bradley Cooper is currently starring in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza as Jon Peters, alongside Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Benny Safdie, Skyler Gisondo and more.

In a four-star review of the film, NME wrote: “A gakked-up ego in a shagger’s white suit who can’t stop banging on about how his girlfriend is Barbra Streisand, Bradley Cooper’s wildly entertaining movie producer Jon Peters is matched only by Tom Waits’ barfly film director Rex Blau and Sean Penn’s pervy and past-his-sell-by-date actor Jack Holden, all of whom manage to take advantage of and belittle the eager-to-impress Kane in their own creepy ways.”