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The photographer James Nachtwey showed up at Bradley Cooper’s farmhouse in Pennsylvania one freezing morning in January, armed with a coat and a camera.
“Let’s take a walk,” an affable Mr. Cooper suggested, leading Mr. Nachtwey through his 33-acre property until they arrived at an ice-crusted stream.
After sharing that he practiced mindfulness by taking cold plunges — immersing himself in freezing water for minutes at a time — Mr. Cooper proceeded to strip down to his black briefs and dive in, flipping over onto his back and closing his eyes.
“I thought I’d have 30 seconds to take the picture,” Mr. Nachtwey said in a recent phone conversation from his home in New Hampshire. “But he stayed in for at least 10 minutes.”
The resulting photo of Mr. Cooper, which appears on the cover of this month’s Great Performers issue of The New York Times Magazine, is one of 12 portraits of this award season’s buzziest actors. Mr. Nachtwey captured the images over a three-week period in January in Los Angeles, New York, Pennsylvania and Atlanta.
Among them: Mark Ruffalo training his own camera on street pigeons, Paul Giamatti curled up on a couch with cats at his favorite used bookstore and Emma Stone wandering through steamy Manhattan streets.
