Bradley Cooper’s Wild Cameo in Dungeons & Dragons Movie Explained

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is chock-full of references aimed squarely at the most dedicated D&D players. But it has at least one thing for all viewers to enjoy: an unexpected, utterly absurd cameo by a well-known actor.

With all cameos, less is more. But in the rules of Dungeons & Dragons, where each person has a set of numerical stats related, for example, to how good they are at flirting, even the briefest appearance can spark curiosity.

So let’s categorize honor among thieves‘ big – well, ok, not big, but really fun cameo.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.]

Image: Paramount Pictures

honor among thieves‘ Unsurprisingly, Bradley Cooper’s sudden appearance. He is a well-known actor play another diminutive character, but this cameo is a smaller role in every way. When our golden-hearted adventurers drop by the old stomping grounds of Holga the Barbarian (Michelle Rodriguez), she visits the home she once shared with her ex-husband, Marlamine, to try to revitalize what they once had.

Here, honor among thieves reveals two things: First, Marlamine is played by Bradley Cooper. Second, marlamine is only about 3 feet tall. The comedy of the scene lies in the way Cooper and Rodriguez struggle to keep their faces straight as they discuss the dissolution of their relationship and the fact that Marlamine has moved on. These are, in fine romance-drama style, two people who sacrificed everything to be together and then realized they weren’t all that compatible. It’s just that one of them is a fur-and-leather-wearing barbarian and the other is a guy whose tiny legs are dangling from the seat of his human-sized armchair.

honor among thieves has not been associated with Marlamine long enough to explicitly invoke his species, as is the case for half-elf Simon or Tiefling Doric. What is this little guy supposed to be within the Dungeons & Dragons canon? It’s up to us, the staff at Polygon, the gaming and entertainment hub, to make our own decision – applying the canonical descriptions of Player’s manual from dungeons 5th Edition, The Source Book of the World honor among thieves was derived.

Bradley Cooper’s D&D movie character is a halfling

Image: Wizards of the Coast

We are fairly confident that the directors of honor among thieves – Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley – intended to read Marlamine as a halfling.

Here are some direct quotes from the description of this species in D&D 5th Edition:

• Standing about 3 feet tall, [halflings] appear relatively harmless.
• They like to wear simple, comfortable and practical clothes and prefer bright colors.
• They value the bonds of family and friendship, and the comforts of hearth and home, and cherish few dreams of gold or fame.
• Many halflings live among other races, where the halfling’s hard work and loyalty afford them rich rewards and physical comforts.

If we had to get it Really Specifically, we’d say that Marlamine is more of a strong halfling than a lightfoot, since lightfoot halflings are “more prone to wanderlust than other halflings” and Marlamine is clearly a couch potato who couldn’t put up with Holga’s traveling lifestyle. (Although Fleetfoots also “often live alongside other races,” so no one can guess.)

If he’s a strong halfling, he gains some resistance to poison and a slightly better Constitution score; if he’s light-footed, he’s better at sneaking and a bit more charismatic. These are facts that we are sure will have enhanced your viewing experience honor among thieves.

But wait, he’s wearing shoes. I thought hobbits didn’t wear shoes?

Image: New Line Cinema

Ah ah ah! There is a gigantic Difference between hobbits created by JRR Tolkien and the halflings appearing in Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons tabletop role-playing games and licensed media based thereon.

You see the Tolkien Estate owns the rights to hobbits that have hairy feet and don’t wear shoes.

And Wizards of the Coast releases material with halflingsWHO Do wear shoes over their unobtrusively hairy feet.

If you would like further clarification on this matter, simply ask an attorney working for Wizards of the Coast.

Oh come on – maybe Marlamine is a gnome?

One could certainly argue that. D&D Issue 5 describes gnomes as “a little over 3 feet tall,” just like Marlamine, and gnomes have more facial hair, like Marlamine, than the generally bare-faced halflings.

But they also sport elaborately styled beards and speak “as if they can’t get the thoughts out of their heads fast enough”. According to the Player’s manualunless a gnome is the adventurous sort, they will likely live in a hidden, subterranean gnome community rather than finding fellowship with other species.

Gnomish traits just don’t match the gentle, patient couch potato qualities we see in Marlamine, all of which made him such a bad partner for Holga.

So he’s probably a halfling.

Wait a minute – isn’t this all reductive, bordering on racism?

Image: Prime Video

What, to generally ascribe specific physical and psychological characteristics to all people of a certain origin? Definitely yes. It’s a fundamental rift in the fantasy genre, one in which tabletop roleplaying games have played a not inconsiderable part.

Thankfully, Wizards of the Coast has slowly been addressing this, both by updating D&D Edition 5 with later updates, and in developing future rulesets for the game that will reportedly emphasize that all species in Dungeons & Dragons are compatible with the endowed with the same beauty variability as our actual human species does in real life.

However, from a story and movie analysis standpoint, we can make a good guess as to which D&D species are the creators Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves intended to read Marlamine. But if he were a real person, we’d certainly hope no one would crouch next to him and be like, ‘okay, but where are you, you know? out of?”