There’s a Reason Everybody Loves Chris Cooper

Chris Cooper was the talk of the Upper East Side. When he first moved to Manhattan in the mid-1970s to pursue acting, he brought his tools with him. And between auditions, he began to pick up home-renovation and handyman jobs—installing custom shelves, building a wet bar, putting in a kitchen, wallpapering, painting. Soon the quiet young man from Missouri with carpentry skills and a toolbox on wheels was a hot commodity in one of New York’s toniest neighborhoods. “The thing that worked was I did one job at a time, from beginning to end, right to their satisfaction,” says Cooper, pointing his finger at me for emphasis. “And my name spread like wildfire. Wildfire.”

In the decades since, the now-seventy-four-year-old Cooper has built his career in much the same way—as a skilled craftsman who brings methodical preparation and total commitment to every project he takes on. That professionalism has long endeared him to directors, casting directors, and his fellow actors. But there’s another rare quality about Cooper that resonates with both filmmakers and audiences. Onscreen, he has a certain ineffable intensity that grabs you no matter how deeply submerged he is in his character, how big the part is, or what kind of project he’s in.

“The main thing that I felt about him as an actor is, this is a guy who can play a subtext,” says the screenwriter and director John Sayles, who gave Cooper his first movie role, as a fiery union organizer in 1987’s Matewan, and has subsequently worked with him on four more films. “He’ll do the lines, and he’ll do them well. And you’ll feel like he’s really connecting with the people in the scene with him. But there’s something else going on there.”

That extra something is reflected in Cooper’s remarkable body of work. He’s played a series of challenging fathers in October Sky (1999), A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), and 1999’s Best Picture winner, American Beauty, in which he portrayed a closeted Vietnam veteran who physically abuses his son. Cooper jumped off the screen as a ruthless, hard-driving CIA secret-ops leader in The Bourne Identity (2002), and he radiated quiet competence as a flinty, veteran horse trainer in Seabiscuit (2003). With just a few minutes of screen time, he turned in a scene-stealing performance as Ben Affleck’s imprisoned father in The Town (2010).

“I’ve had some damn good, intense scenes in my career,” Cooper admits with a laugh.

For all the hard-edged and restrained men he’s portrayed over the years, though, Cooper earned the most recognition acting opposite Meryl Streep in a more idiosyncratically comic role as John Laroche, the orchid-obsessed Florida flower poacher in Adaptation (2002). Based on a book by Susan Orlean with a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze, the movie is at times surreal. But Cooper, sporting long and stringy hair, tinted glasses, and a prosthetic mouthpiece missing the upper middle teeth, is mesmerizing.

In perhaps the movie’s most memorable scene, Cooper as Laroche tries to explain to Streep’s character, while driving his van, how he can drop his fixations as quickly as he embraces them. “I once fell deeply, profoundly in love with tropical fish,” he tells her. His house was filled with fish tanks. “Then one day I say, ‘Fuck fish. I renounce fish. I vow never to set foot in that ocean again.’ That’s how much ‘Fuck fish.’ ” A bewildered Streep asks why. “Done with fish,” he says matter-of-factly. Cooper won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the performance.

Sitting in the lobby lounge of the Bowery Hotel with his wife, the actress and writer Marianne Leone, Cooper is reminiscing about his life growing up near Kansas City. His father was a doctor who raised cattle on the side. While Cooper’s older brother, who would go on to become a home builder, was charismatic and outgoing, Cooper suffered from a crippling shyness. “It was absurd,” he says, looking back. “It was nuts.”

Partly to confront his shyness, he developed an interest in acting. In high school, he went to the artistic director at a local theater and offered his services doing everything but acting. He swept floors, he was a scene changer, he built sets, designed sets, became shop foreman. When Cooper graduated from high school in 1969, the Vietnam War was raging. “I had to save my ass,” he says. So he enlisted in the Coast Guard Reserve, which gave him the freedom to attend college and keep pursuing theater.

After making the move to New York, Cooper began taking classes from Wynn Handman, the cofounder of the American Place Theatre in Hell’s Kitchen, a venerable launching pad for playwrights and actors such as Sam Shepard and Dustin Hoffman. Leone was a fellow acting student and made the first move with the still-reserved Cooper. They were married in 1983, and Cooper’s theater career flourished.

Then came a pivotal year in their lives. In 1987, Cooper and Leone’s son Jesse was born ten weeks premature. Shortly after his birth, Jesse suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and developed severe cerebral palsy. He would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair as a quadriplegic. That same year, Cooper was in Matewan, launching him into movies. Cooper and Leone eventually decided to move to Massachusetts, south of Boston, where they could get Jesse into a public school system more accommodating than New York City’s. “As soon as we moved to Massachusetts,” says Cooper. “my career really picked up.” Adding: “I don’t know what that has to do with anything—faith, luck, timing.”

Life in Massachusetts allowed Jesse to thrive; he became an honor student in high school. And being away from the hype of Hollywood and the clamor of Manhattan suited Cooper. Providing for their son became his true north, and the paychecks he earned from big-budget-movie roles paid for special facilities, like an indoor pool that gave Jesse priceless moments of freedom. In 2005, Jesse died unexpectedly from an epileptic seizure at age seventeen.

Not long after, Cooper costarred in a movie called Breach as Robert Hanssen, a real-life FBI agent who spied for the Soviet Union for two decades. At the end of the movie, after Hanssen is caught, there’s a scene in which an elevator opens and Hanssen’s young colleague comes face-to-face with him. “Pray for me,” says Cooper as Hanssen, a look of bottomless anguish on his face. “The direction was, ‘You’ll never see your family again,’ ” says Cooper now, his eyes welling with tears. “That’s all it took.”

When the director Oliver Hermanus was casting his new movie, The History of Sound, which hits theaters in September, he started to hear Chris Cooper’s voice in his head. Based on a short story by Ben Shattuck, the film follows the story of Lionel, a gifted singer from rural Kentucky played by Paul Mescal, who leaves home in 1917 for music school in Boston. Lionel shares a passionate romance with a fellow music student, played by Josh O’Connor. They’re torn apart by World War I, reunited for a magical trip through the woods of Maine to make recordings of traditional music, and then separated again for good. Hermanus had his lead actors lined up. But he was searching for the right person to play the older Lionel in the movie’s poignant final scenes. Cooper, he knew, would be perfect. “He was the dream scenario,” says Hermanus.

Cooper has never had a problem rejecting roles that didn’t suit him. “I have a reputation of being a little picky,” he says. He’s turned down plenty of parts in blockbusters over the years, without regret. But he thought the screenplay Shattuck wrote for The History of Sound was beautiful. “I read the script, and I said, This is what I live for, you know?” says Cooper.

So he traveled down from Massachusetts for a couple days of shooting in Jersey City. For a crucial final scene, Cooper needed to act alone to the camera while listening to decades-old recordings. And to bring Lionel’s emotional journey full circle, he had to conjure a lifetime of imagined feeling in the moment. Hermanus was floored by his performance. “As a director, you leave those experiences going, At least I had those two days with Chris Cooper,” he says. “Whatever comes, I know that I’ve worked with somebody so specific and so spectacular.”

For Cooper, that’s what it means to do your job as an actor, right to the director’s satisfaction.

Story by Brian O’Keefe
Photographed by Micaiah Carter
Styled by Chloe Hartstein
Grooming by Jenny Sauce using Orveda Skincare and Oribe
Set Design by Michael Sturgeon
Tailoring by Yana Galbshtein
Visual Director: James Morris
Entertainment Director: Andrea Cuttler
Video Director: Amanda Kabbabe
Video Senior Producer: Brian Murray-Real
Director of Photography: Alvah Holmes
Associate Cinematographer: Jay Aguirre
Video Producer: Ali Buchalter
Video Editor: Jeff Sharkey