5 Things About What Bradley Cooper Is Really Like in the Kitchen

Any chef worth his, uh, salt knows that restaurant life is no easy life. You get a taste of this watching Bradley Cooper as Adam Jones — a bad boy chef on a mission for three Michelin stars — in his latest movie Burnt, which opened last week.

When you're training under a world-class chef, even an Academy Award-nominated actor has a lot to learn. Delish.com chatted with top chef Marcus Wareing (of the two-starred Marcus in London), who worked closely with Bradley to make the restaurant scenes in Burnt ​as real as possible. Here's what Wareing had to say about working with the A-lister.

1. He's a natural … actor.

"Bradley is very good at what he does. I wasn't there to make him a chef, I was there to make him look like a chef and act like a chef," says Wareing. "If [the cast] became better cooks, great. If it didn't work, I had to get my team to step in. They did it very well, but it was never easy."

2. He got trained on recipes from Wareing's past menus.

To really drill down how intense a cook's job can get, Wareing pulled from recipes he developed during his own career and adapted them for the film. And these are recipes that consist of 50 or so components for one plate. "Chefs always try to challenge themselves," Wareing says. "They don't want to make their lives easy. I wanted it to be a challenge for the chefs on set."

3. He didn't have a makeup crew.

The exhaustion? Real. "There was no makeup artist making everyone look like tired chefs. It was all natural. You know in movies when you have a bloodbath? You've got to get that looking right — you've got an entire team of makeup people that make that happen," Wareing explains. "That's not in [our movie]."

4. In fact, everything about that kitchen is real.

Wareing's job to make everything around Cooper feel realistic was not taken lightly. "You could have lifted that kitchen out of the studio and put it in the middle of a restaurant, and it would work. It was a fully operational and functional kitchen," he says. "And it was stunning. There was no expense spared with Harvey [Weinstein]. He bought the best of everything."

5. And those tantrums? He saved them for the camera.

There's the table flipping:

Oh, and this violence:

"Those are the best scenes of all," says Wareing. "Those are the [scenes] I really enjoy. Tantrums were always part of the filming, but outside the filming, [the set] was incredibly calm and professional."

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