Lifestyle
To become the 'Maestro,' Bradley Cooper learned to live the music
Bradley Cooper plays composer Leonard Bernstein in Maestro.
Jason McDonald/Netflix
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Jason McDonald/Netflix
Bradley Cooper plays composer Leonard Bernstein in Maestro.
Jason McDonald/Netflix
As a child, actor Bradley Cooper was so fascinated by music conductors that he asked for a baton as a birthday gift. He remembers whirling his arms around in his bedroom — and feeling like a wizard.
“There was something magical about being able to physically move to a rhythm,” he says. “And then, in my imagination, [to] be able to perceive that I was actually harnessing and commanding that music. I mean, it was really like a magic trick, every time.”
Cooper channeled that energy as the co-writer, director and star of Maestro, a film about the internationally famous composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. Widely considered the first great American conductor, Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic from 1957 to ’69, and also composed classical music, as well as music for Broadway and film.
Cooper says conducting as Bernstein in the film was tricky: “I had no desire to imitate what he was doing, because that would have been a soulless, in my experience, endeavor.” Instead, the actor consulted with conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who helped him find his own rhythm on the podium.
Nézet-Séguin is the artistic and music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, music director of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and music director and principal conductor of the Orchestre Métropolitain in Montreal. Though he was 15 when Bernstein died, Nézet-Séguin refers to the conductor as, “hands down, always my greatest conducting model.”
“I always felt even when I was a teenager, that this is the way I wanted to express music on the podium, just expressing with all my body and not being shy of showing my emotions on the podium,” Nézet-Séguin says.
For Nézet-Séguin, Bernstein’s influence is both professional and personal. He notes that Bernstein’s sexuality — he was married to a woman but also had relationships with men — helped open doors for others in the classical music field.
“The fact that he lived this and didn’t hide it completely, well, it allowed people like [conductor] Michael Tilson Thomas or like me to now live it fully, have husbands,” Nézet-Séguin says. “This is … one of the many reasons why this film is so important. It’s not so much that it’s about a bisexual or a gay character, but more about how complex it is.”
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Interview highlights
On the centerpiece of the film, the final movement of Mahler’s “Symphony No. 2”
Nézet-Séguin: This, just from a logistics point of view, for a conductor, it’s the most complex. Now, this specific moment also comes at the very end of a very long symphony that’s about 90 minutes long. So you’re almost one hour and a half into blood and sweat and tears of some of the most soulful and profound music that’s ever been written. And as a conductor, you have to keep your mind cool because you need to still direct the traffic … well, but also be completely emotionally involved in the meaning of this music.
Cooper: There’s this incredible video of Lenny conducting this piece in 1973 in Ely Cathedral with the London Symphony Orchestra, which is exactly what we replicated. But I always knew that I wasn’t going to just imitate what he was doing. It was actually finding that middle ground. And Yannick was in particular so supportive of me, as Lenny, finding whatever that mode of conducting is, which was, of course, infused entirely by not only the interpretation of the score, which is what we did in terms of tempo, but also in terms of his gesticulating and all of that. But having it be original because the goal was to conduct in real time this piece and record it.
On the theatricality that Bernstein displayed while conducting
Cooper: Bernstein himself, he was often asked about his antics, as you know, on the podium. And he would always talk about how it was all about his relationship to the orchestra, and to the musicians that he was making music with, and not about him performing for the audience. … At any moment, [he] was always just completely in the music.
Nézet-Séguin: Maybe it’s something that Lenny had been accused of in his lifetime. Because, of course, he was a completely larger than life person and therefore a larger than life conductor. … Well, I can say really, like Bradley just said, that no orchestra in the world would respond to a conductor who would be theatrical in [that] way of performative for an audience. This is something that many people forget. They think that the conductor is so aware of the audience that they do something for them. But then orchestras smell that miles away and they stop looking at the conductor, and then therefore the conductor cannot have a career, or at least not a career in the scope that Bernstein did.
On Bernstein’s signature jumping on the podium while conducting
Cooper: Yeah, there’s wonderful photographs of him levitating above the podium and many recordings of one being able to hear his feet stomping on the podium after having been a foot in the air. So, yeah, that was one of his trademark sonic gifts to his conducting.
Nézet-Séguin: It’s still taught that conducting should be this and that, and in a box, and not too much of this, and not too much of that. And I don’t want here to insult any great conducting teachers around the world. They’re doing amazing work. But sometimes we forget that conducting is about just living the music. And at that moment, that’s what Lenny taught all of us in a way. At that moment, the music is jumping. … It’s almost like the whole world is waking up. So one needs to illustrate that and why not jump, you know? As long as it’s organic.
Cooper and Nézet-Séguin on the set of Maestro.
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Cooper and Nézet-Séguin on the set of Maestro.
Jason McDonald/Netflix
On conducting with an open mouth
Nézet-Séguin: I cannot imagine conducting [with my] mouth closed, especially not when there’s a chorus. I mean, conductors, we don’t sing. … Lenny did that a lot and I think we all do it, because it’s kind of breathing. … It’s letting even more the sound feeling open, when we let our mouth open. … The arms are open, the heart is open, and therefore the mouth is just opening up — all that’s possible for one of the greatest climactic moments in the music.
Cooper: I did notice that I opened my mouth a lot, just conducting to a recording of anything. And thank goodness Lenny did that. In the video from 1973, as I recall, he’s only opening his mouth when he’s actually saying the words of Mahler’s “Resurrection” that the chorus is saying. … What’s in the movie is the last take. The way it went down is I really messed up the whole first day, because I had entered into it with fear and 99% of the movie I went into fearlessly. But I had set up all of these cameras really thinking that deep down I wasn’t going to be able to conduct it and I’d have to edit, create a scene out of in the editing room. And so I went into it already fearful. And obviously when you do that, you can be struck by fear and then not be able to succeed. And so I was behind tempo. I forgot to cue people and I messed up. And then the second day, which we weren’t even supposed to shoot that scene, I brought in the techno crane, which is a manner of filming from outside into the hall, and I created one single shot, which is what it always should have been. So because I really let loose that last take and I did an audible prayer in front of everybody to Lenny, thanking him and thanking them, and we did it one more time. And I really allowed myself true abandon and that’s why my mouth was open. And that’s sort of more than I would have liked – but it was so pure and real that I thought, “No this is it. This is it. And it is 100% authentic.”
Lauren Krenzel and Thea Challoner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
In central London’s Waterloo Place, a life-size statue that emerged overnight in late April has been creating a stir. When I visited a few weeks after it was erected, local authorities had already set up protective barriers around it.
The installation — signed by the famed street artist Banksy — depicts a man in a suit hoisting a flag as he strides over a precipice. As he marches on, the flag blows backward to cover his face, leaving him unaware he’s only a step away from a perilous fall.
Set among grand monuments celebrating Britain’s past, the “flag man” takes on a particular visual irony at a time when the country — and much of the world — is debating its path forward.
Like many viewers there, I found myself wondering whether this statue is Banksy’s warning about the consequences of uncritical nationalism, or simply a reflection on human shortsightedness. Or, perhaps, it is just prompting us to ponder a broader question: What happens when devotion to a symbol prevents us from seeing what lies ahead?
Whatever the message, the work feels remarkably attuned to the current moment.
For more Far-Flung Postcards, click here.
Lifestyle
Wait, it’s a candle? Her beeswax fruit and veggie ones look so real, you’ll want to take a bite
Jessica Gonzalez hustles behind her booth at the recent Renegade Craft Fair, frantically ringing up sales, answering questions and packaging her beeswax candles.
It’s hot on the grounds of the Los Angeles State Historic Park in April, but 35-year-old Gonzalez and her fiancé, Jordan Colindres, keep their cool as a crowd gathers to admire her Happy Organics candle collection, a homage to her family’s produce company in the Central Valley that looks like real fruits and vegetables.
“I love doing in-person events because it’s so fun to see people’s reactions,” she said a few months later. “It makes me feel good to see other people finding joy in my candles. They often say, ‘Oh, that’s really funny.’ And it is funny to have a cherry candle on top of your birthday cake.”
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1. A staff member pulls a beeswax corn candle, $26, out of its mold at Happy Organics’ studio in downtown Los Angeles. 2. Each Beeswax Mixed Berry Birthday Candles set is cast from real mixed berries — strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries and cherries. A set of 10 is $30. 3. Bartlett green pears and heirloom tomatoes, $24 to $40.
Judging by the smiles and charmed looks on shoppers’ faces, her produce-inspired candles are less about illuminating rooms and more about sharing the joy she sought when she first started the company in 2018.
In this series, we highlight independent makers and artists, from glassblowers to fiber artists, who are creating original products in and around Los Angeles.
But then, it’s hard not to smile at the playfully elegant Bosc pears, puckered mandarins and green-and-purple asparagus taper candles which range in price from $12 to $40. Some are molded into corn on the cob, celery and rhubarb shapes. Others are made to look like mushrooms, figs, tomatoes and snap peas. The most popular are the small birthday candles shaped like raspberries, cherries and blackberries, packed in molded-pulp baskets just like you’d find at the grocery store or farmers market.
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Gonzalez didn’t start out as a designer. The youngest of nine children, she was born in 1991 in Salinas and later moved to Merced, where she grew up on a 10-acre farm. She studied computer science at Mills College, then worked in tech consulting in the Bay Area and eventually became the CTO of an ag-tech company. When her mother, Angela, became ill in 2016, she returned to Merced to be with her family.
When her mom died suddenly soon after she moved home, Gonzalez left the tech industry. “I wasn’t connected with what I was doing,” she said. “I wanted to find something more meaningful; something I loved. I didn’t want my ego to keep me stuck in what I studied in college. I decided to let myself try new hobbies and passions and look for joy again.”
After her mother’s death, she began working with her father, Salvador, and her uncles at the family’s apiary, where they managed more than 30 hives. (Her grandfather was also a beekeeper in Michoacán, Mexico.) Soon, she began selling their raw honey at local farmers markets. In a heartbreaking turn, her father was diagnosed with cancer a year later, so she started making cannabis-infused honey, balms and chocolates to help ease his pain.
When she saw that the beeswax candles, which last significantly longer than paraffin candles, were selling faster than the honey, she decided to focus on making candles from the leftovers from her uncles’ hives.
She was only 25, but it was a turning point. “It was one of those moments where I felt like I needed to change my path,” she said. “I needed to change everything in my life.”
Jessica Gonzalez and her father Salvador on their family farm in Merced. (Gonzalez family)
Gonzalez at Happy Organics’ studio in downtown Los Angeles. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
When her father died in 2018, she inherited his bees and started Happy Organics, although she hadn’t planned on starting a business. After experiencing so much loss, making candles became a kind of therapy. “It felt great to work with my hands again, something I thought I’d never have time for,” she said.
Her oldest sister, Sonia Gonzalez, said Gonzalez reminds her a lot of their father, who reinvented himself many times over the years.
The nopal cactus is cast from a real nopal and hand-poured in 100% pure beeswax in the Los Angeles studio.
“He grew up as a village boy in the rural mountains of Michoacán, Mexico, and went on to work in restaurants, cut down Christmas trees and pick strawberries and broccoli in the fields of Salinas,” she wrote in an email. “From there, he started selling produce door-to-door, then at flea markets and eventually built his own produce distribution business from the ground up. As the youngest of nine kids from a working-class family, Jessica’s always been incredibly resourceful, responsible, and amazing at reinventing herself.”
Like a lot of millennials, Gonzalez taught herself how to make candles by watching YouTube videos. She started with hand-dipped tapers, working in the garage on the farm that helped her feel safe and connected to her parents. “It was a really nice environment to try something new and creative,” she said.
Inspired by her family’s produce, she cast real corn, strawberries and cherries in plaster, then made a silicone mold to create copies. Even when using the same mold, color can vary from batch to batch, and how it cools also affects the result. “That’s just how handmade things are,” she said. “There’s always some variation.”
Cherry molds make cherry candles at Happy Organics’ studio in downtown Los Angeles.
A variety of fruit and veggie candles.
When she moved to Los Angeles in 2023 to be with Colindres, her business took off. “L.A. is a great place to grow,” she said. “There’s so much opportunity here. When I go to a farmers market, I never know who I’ll meet.”
She sold her candles in person at craft shows, the Hollywood Farmers’ Market and most recently, during a residency at the P.F. Candle Co. showroom in Echo Park.
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1. A staff member trims the wicks on a pair of carrot birthday candles, $22. 2. Gonzalez passes by shelves of candles at Happy Organics’ studio in downtown Los Angeles. 3. Asparagus taper candles, $30.
“I have a lot of respect for her as a fellow candle maker (making molds is not easy), but getting to know her story more and how her choice of foods and wax is reflective of her family’s history gave it so much meaning,” P.F. Candle Co. founder and creative director Kristen Pumphrey said in an email. “It’s been a tough couple of years for L.A. businesses, so we gotta stick together — there’s this wonderful sense of community hosting a local brand that’s so passionate about their work.”
As her business has expanded, her products are now available at Terrain, Joan’s on Third and the MoMA Design Store in addition to her website. She has also had to source beeswax from other vendors across the country to keep up with demand.
Kimberly Curtis, owner of Hide & Seek Vintage in Studio City, said Gonzalez’s strawberry and cherry birthday candles “flew off the shelves last year” during the holidays. “Our customers love them,” she added.
Gonzalez holds a cabbage candle.
Still, Gonzalez stays connected to her Central Valley roots. Everything she and her small team make in downtown Los Angeles is handmade and “takes time,” she said, describing the steps involved in crafting quality candles. Right now, her favorite is the Nopal Cactus candle, which she made using a clipping from an employee’s yard. While others help her with production, wholesale management and packaging, she focuses on sales, content and all-new product development.
When asked if she has advice for others who want to start their own business, Gonzalez admits she sometimes feels overwhelmed.
In 2013, Gonzalez and her family gathered at their Merced ranch to celebrate her parents’ anniversary.
(Gonzalez family)
“The biggest thing that has gotten me through the toughest spots is my why or my reason for starting,” she said. “I think that has to be really strong. That’s what brought me a lot of comfort when I felt like quitting: going back to the beginning and remembering why I started this.”
For Gonzalez, her reason is always close to her heart. “I wanted to feel connected to my parents in some way,” she said. “This was a good representation of my upbringing.”
The Kennedy Center, the facade of which remains covered with a tarp, is seen in Washington, DC, on June 28, 2026. A US federal judge asked on June 24 for an explanation for why a tarpaulin continues to cover the facade of the Kennedy Center where President Donald Trump’s name was recently removed. District Judge Christopher Cooper gave the board of trustees of the performing arts venue until the end of July to explain “the purpose for and status of the tarp and scaffolding that Defendants have erected on the front portico of the Center.”
ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
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ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
More than two weeks ago, President Trump’s name was removed from the Kennedy Center facade though it is still covered by a tarp and the legal battle continues.
On Monday, a U.S. Department of Justice filing on behalf of the Kennedy Center included some surprises. The document was submitted in response to issues raised by lawyers for ex-officio board member Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio who is suing to remove President Trump’s name from the center and stop its closure for renovations.
Among the revelations, the Kennedy Center admitted that, during a board meeting on December 18, 2025, Beatty had been “muted and prevented from speaking.” It was at that meeting that the board voted to add President Trump’s name to the center. The filing later acknowledges the congresswoman was “prevented from voicing her opposition.”
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is a living memorial to its namesake. The guidelines for how the theatre complex spends federal dollars are very specific. Among other rules, it states that “no additional memorials or plaques shall be designated or installed.” Beatty argues adding Trump’s name runs afoul of those rules and that any change requires approval from Congress.
According to one of Beatty’s filings, “There was no advance notice in the agenda that the Board would be considering a name change,” a statement the Kennedy Center now does not deny. The center admits that, prior to voting, there was “no discussion about potential risks or downsides of the vote to adopt a secondary name for the Center.” Nor was there a board discussion “about any potential conflict of interest that might result from the vote.”
The center’s lawyers previously contended that if Trump’s name were to be removed, it would “lose money from donors who support” him and “impede the Center’s fundraising efforts.”
Closing for renovations
Earlier this year, Trump announced on social media that the Kennedy Center would close for two years for renovations. He wrote that he made the decision after “a one year review” with “Contractors, Musical Experts, Art Institutions, and other Advisors and Consultants.”
But, according to the center’s lawyers, Trump’s announcement “was made without presenting any plans, analyses, timelines, or funding information to his cotrustees and without any Board vote.”
The Kennedy Center has long denied reporting by The Washington Post that ticket sales plummeted after President Trump became the Center’s board chair. In Monday’s legal filing, the Center admits that, by October 2025, “nearly half of the Center’s tickets were going unsold.”
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