Laura Dern and Will Arnett returned to London with Bradley Cooper for a UK gala screening of Is This Thing On?, his comedy of a marriage ending and a stand-up career beginning.
Laura Dern and Will Arnett brought Is This Thing On? back to London on Monday 19 January 2026, for a UK gala screening at the Odeon Luxe West End with Bradley Cooper, who directed it.
Dern was born in Los Angeles in 1967 to the actors Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd. She came to notice in Mask and Smooth Talk in 1985, made Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart with David Lynch, and earned her first Academy Award nomination for Rambling Rose. She was Ellie Sattler in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park in 1993, and her divorce lawyer in Marriage Story won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, with the BAFTA and the Golden Globe.
Cooper wrote the film with Arnett and Mark Chappell, loosely from the life of the English comedian John Bishop, who has a story credit. Arnett plays Alex, who meets middle age and the end of his marriage by trying stand-up in New York, and Dern plays Tess, his wife, weighing what she gave up for their family. It closed the New York Film Festival in October 2025.
The film had played a Royal Festival Hall gala at the BFI London Film Festival three months earlier. Andra Day and Ciarán Hinds of the cast joined the evening with the co-writer Mark Chappell, as did Bishop himself, an executive producer of the film.