Bradley Cooper Is So Good at This

Cooper is very good at playing someone adept at persuasion, either through intimidation or guile. And aren’t those perfect qualities for a Gemstone? Photo: Connie Chornuk/HBO

Spoilers follow for “Prelude,” the fourth- and final-season premiere of The Righteous Gemstones. 

In the final-season premiere of The Righteous Gemstones, a star is reborn: Bradley Cooper is playing an asshole again, and man, is it nice to get another look at him being as pathetic as he is handsome.

Sorry to anyone holding onto memories of Cooper as besotted nice guy Will Tippin in Alias or enamored with antihero raccoon bounty hunter Rocket in the MCU (no judgments here; I grew up in love with a roguish animated fox), but Cooper’s at his best when he’s playing a little skeezy and a lot villainous. As an ambitious cop in The Place Beyond the Pines? Boring, predictable. Man defined entirely by the phrase “Go, Birds” in Silver Linings Playbook? Overly sincere, no edge. But when B.Coop smiles in that way where it doesn’t reach those oceanic-blue eyes? That’s when you know things are about to get good.

That expression has worked for a number of different characters over Cooper’s career: a carnival con man in Nightmare Alley, an arms dealer on a terrorist watch list in War Dogs, a nature lover with anger issues and a supremely punchable face in Wedding Crashers. He is particularly solid at throwaway insults (in War Dogs: “I can’t spend more than 48 hours in this dump … I was talking about America”), obsessive bits (bullying a teenager into correctly pronouncing “Streisand” in Licorice Pizza, all as a flex to brag about dating Babs), and the one-two punch of a stanky line delivery and a daunting stare. All of which is to say, Cooper is very good at playing someone adept at persuasion, either through intimidation or guile. And aren’t those perfect qualities for a Gemstone?

Previous seasons of The Righteous Gemstones have regularly bounced back in time to show us various stages of the titular family’s past: Aimee-Leigh Gemstone’s child-star days with her brother Baby Billy; Eli Gemstone’s wrestling era; the Gemstone children’s canonically annoying adolescence. Appropriately for the series’ final season, premiere episode “Prelude” takes that history to its extreme, going all the way back to Virginia in 1862 to show how the Gemstones got into the religion game. And it is a game at first for Elijah Gemstone, played by Cooper under a thick slick of grime and gigantic pork-chop sideburns. Elijah is a criminal, slithering beneath the chaos of the Civil War to hit up churches and steal their collection plates — and, in this fateful case, murder the preacher, Abel Grieves, and steal his identity when a group of Confederate soldiers comes to enlist Abel as the chaplain of their regiment. Cooper gives Elijah a look of near glee when he finds Abel’s gold-plated Bible, chomping down on it to determine its authenticity, and a kind of shrugging indifference as he accepts the soldiers’ offer of $50 salary, tossing away his old life by smashing in Abel’s face and leaving a note on the body. In that hastily scrawled missive, Elijah writes, “This is the body of a crook who tried to rob me. His name is Elijah Gemstone, and he is dead now. He was very handsome.” There’s that Gemstone vanity for you.

Three weeks later, though, the deception isn’t going exactly as Elijah planned. Turns out he isn’t really suited to that whole “offer comfort and religious guidance to those in need” thing. Cooper, however, is exceptionally well suited to the stupid phrasing and blunt expressionism of the Righteous Gemstones universe, communicating his character’s visible discomfort at injured soldiers’ bedsides (a deadpan “I’ve been praying this whole time, in my mind” is the best he has to offer during a dying man’s final moments) and shock at the number of people who gather for his Sunday sermon (“Dismissed, amen, yeah”). Later, a nearly dialogue-free sequence in which Elijah chokes out a man who recognizes him from his Gemstone days and then hides the body in a coffin with an already-dead soldier makes great use of Cooper’s ability to go broad: He gags, he chokes, he huffs and puffs, and he rolls his eyes at the effort of maintaining his ruse. All of the overzealous football tackles in Wedding Crashers and car-window smashing in Licorice Pizza led to this.

The Righteous Gemstones has always been a show willing to lean into the ostentatious, from the recurring use of male full-frontal nudity to Uncle Baby Billy’s Liberace-esque outfits, and episode director and co-writer Danny McBride uses that same here’s-the-thing, you-can’t-look-away-from-the-thing approach for the series’ biggest-name guest star to date. Cooper’s strong-jawed face gets a ton of screen time, from his disgruntled and bored look when standing at the camp’s makeshift podium to his obvious delight counting his winnings from playing cards against the regiment’s soldiers. The Righteous Gemstones has eased off its direct condemnation of the family’s embrace of the prosperity doctrine since the series’ first season, but we get a reprise of it here through Cooper’s covetous handling of all that cash by beautiful flickering candlelight, the dirty bills representing the desire that drew him into this switcheroo and keeps him killing people to cover up his tracks.

A core aspect of The Righteous Gemstones is that the Gemstones, as awful as they may be, are convinced of their own exceptionalism, and Cooper gives that family trait an origin story via Elijah’s shift from selfish aggression to dumbfounded piety. After Elijah escapes a northern ambush and evades execution because he’s seen by those opposing soldiers as a man of God, he’s so moved by that turn of fate that he gives a genuine final sermon to the remaining Confederates. “I give each of them my highest recommendation that they get into Heaven” is the kind of self-serious gibberish that Elijah’s descendants, Jesse, Judy, and Kelvin, spew all the time, and Cooper plays it with just enough yearning to feel sincere and just enough ego to communicate that he still thinks he’s better than these people. The episode’s final scene affirms Elijah’s belief in his own singularity: When he brings the dead bodies of those men back to the Confederate camp, he doesn’t tell the regiment’s captain or other members that the “Yanks” saved him. “It was God,” he intones, and when he sits down in his tent that night, it’s not with secret gambling gains. It’s with that gold-plated Bible, which he begins to read, now convinced that he’s been chosen.

This level of slight sociopathy is exactly what Cooper is so exceedingly skillful at capturing in his baddies: He pumps them full of enough certainty and self-assurance that they think they can do anything, while also undercutting their moments of success. Remember his try-hard failure as a wannabe wiseguy in American Hustle? There’s a similar performativity shaping his turn as Elijah Gemstone, whom Cooper paints as a man burning bright and then burning out, his embrace of religion a kind of admission that he can’t succeed doing anything else. That goes for nearly all the Gemstones who would follow in his footsteps: Most of Elijah’s descendants can’t hold a real job, or chart a different path for themselves, or give up the feeling of being special. They’re cursed with the same belief in themselves, and Cooper’s ability to weaponize his looks in service of that smugness — well, it’s limitless, and it makes “Prelude” a perfect way to start the end of the Gemstones’ self-involved saga.