Get Smarter
At Limitless' New York Premiere, Bradley Cooper and Co. on What They'd Do With an IQ Boost
The blue pill or the red pill? Neither, for Bradley Cooper in the new movie Limitless, in which his character develops a habit for a transparent little tablet that temporarily gives him a four-digit IQ. Before he knows it, Cooper's struggling writer is a Wall Street superstar who's ten steps ahead of humanity in the areas of flirting, foreign languages, and just about everything else. Unfortunately, the wonder drug comes with some side effects.
"Besides being fun, it's a parking-lot conversation afterwards," Cooper said of the film at last night's premiere. "It definitely opens into a lot of questions." Among them: how best to put superhuman mental capabilities to use in real life? Cooper's co-star Abbie Cornish said she'd promote animal rights, while Alyssa Milano kept her ambitions modest: "The New York Times crossword puzzle." As for Sir Richard Branson, who recently expanded his Virgin empire into the production of films, including this one—well, some people would say he's running on a few extra cylinders already.
At the after-party at Buddakan, baggies containing clear capsules (ginger candies, actually) were set out on tables, while waiters served the dubious performance-enhancers Red Bull and DeLeón tequila. Caroline Winberg, who appears briefly in the film as a party girl but nevertheless plays a key role in the plot, mentioned that the nude scenes she'd shot had been cut. "Of course I wish they would have stayed in, but my boyfriend is very happy they didn't," she announced. How would the Swedish model have used the extra brain power the pill provides? "Maybe I'd run to be the first female president," she mused, adding that she had an easy fix for the issue of her foreign birth: "I'd change the rules."
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