The Righteous Gemstones viewers got a nice surprise when Bradley Cooper popped up on the screen in the show’s season four premiere!
The HBO comedy series kicked off it’s final season on Sunday night (March 9) with an appearance that was unknown until the episode debuted.
Bradley can be seen throughout the ep, titled “Prelude,” playing a Gemstone ancestor, as the series traveled back in time to 1862.
In the ep, during the height of the Civil War, a young man named Gemstone gets a divine wake-up call.
Creator, writer and star Danny McBride opened up about how he got Bradley to join the cast of the show for the episode.
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“I knew it would be a tough role, because this show is obviously an ensemble,” he said at the premiere last week, via Deadline. “There are so many incredible actors here that the audience is showing up for and to invite the audience back after the show’s been off for a little bit, and to show up and not be any of these beautiful faces, it just had to be somebody who was more beautiful than all of us.”
He recalled talking to his producing partner Brandon James, “Who’s the type of the person to go to for this?”
“It was like, it needs to be somebody that has some real charisma and charm to pull off this turn with this character, someone that the audience won’t mind going on this journey with, and somebody that can hold the entire thing on their own shoulders. And I think I just threw away, flippantly, somebody like Bradley Cooper. And Brandon was like, well, we should just ask him,” Danny said.
Danny also mentioned he thought it would take some persuading to get Bradley to sign on.
“You know what? I would imagine that I would’ve had to persuade him,” he said, via People. “I sent him the script and he called me back pretty quickly. He liked what was presented.“
“What was interesting is [Cooper] had actually never seen The Gemstones before, but he didn’t want to watch it until we were done shooting,” Danny added. “He didn’t want it to influence him, which I appreciate. I thought that was a good way to approach this.”
The Righteous Gemstones‘ fourth and final season airs new episodes on Sunday nights on HBO and streaming on Max. Get the scoop on the new and returning cast!
