Warning: This post contains mild spoilers for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
Bradley Cooper has demonstrated a lot of range over the years, but his most recent role required him to shrink down—literally.
In Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, an actually successful film adaptation of the popular tabletop role-playing game, Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez play a bard and a barbarian on a quest to save their child. The young girl, Kira, is Edgin’s (Pine’s) daughter biologically, and Holga (Rodriguez) has been a maternal presence throughout her life. After springing themselves from prison, the two team up with a druid (Sophia Lillis) and a mage (Justice Smith) to take down their shifty former partner-in-crime, played by Hugh Grant.
Cooper shows up for only a few minutes, but his scene-stealing performance was raucous enough to break Austin’s Paramount Theatre into a shared and sustained fit of laughter during Honor Among Thieves’ premiere at South by Southwest earlier this spring. Partway through the proceedings, Holga returns to the cottage she once shared with her ex-husband to gather some supplies. It’s there that we meet Cooper, who plays Holga’s ex-husband Marlamin—a halfling.
Honor Among Thieves plays the initial sight gag for all it’s worth as Cooper stands up to face Rodriguez, and the actors both seem to have a blast as they cheekily ignore the absurdity of the situation—a barbarian and her halfling ex-husband talking out some extremely mundane marital problems, alongside a few less-than-common gripes. In the end, we discover that Marlamin has found love again with a human companion with a slightly less dangerous career. It’s a bummer for Holga, but it’s also just the motivation she needs to fuel her vengeance against Grant’s villainous Forge Fitzwilliam.
During a recent interview with Yahoo! Entertainment, Rodriguez revealed that another actor had originally been cast in the scene, and that because her shoot and the halfling’s took place separately, she never worked with him as a scene partner at all. (That said, she does know him in real life and attested that he’s a “cool dude.) “They added [Bradley] after the fact and then told me about it,” Rodriguez told Yahoo! “I was like, ‘What?’”
Jonathan Goldstein, who co-wrote and directed Dungeons & Dragons with John Francis Daley, told Yahoo! that the pair didn’t want to incorporate too many celebrity cameos because “there’s a risk that it can take audiences out of the film if they start to see too many famous faces.”
That said, Goldstein added, Cooper’s appearance “did exactly what we wanted it to do: It’s right in the middle of the movie, and it’s such a shock and such a fun little addition.”
In recent years, we’ve seen Bradley Cooper morph into a troubled musician, carnival worker, Hollywood producer (and Barbra Streisand’s ex) Jon Peters, and also a raccoon. He might only get to play a halfling for a few minutes, but for those few minutes, it’s an incredible journey.
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