THE CONFLICT
“WHAT IS WITH THESE TWO?”
“There’s only so much emotional drama you can play up between jets,” smiles Kosinski. Of all the relationships in the film, none is more important than that between Maverick and Bradley ‘Rooster’ Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick’s old chum Goose (Anthony Edwards), who took Berlin’s advice perhaps a little too literally in the first movie. The big surprise here isn’t that Rooster is simply angry at Maverick over the death of his father — Maverick also used his influence to impede Bradley’s progress as a pilot, lest he suffer the same fate as his old man. With Rooster understandably pissed, that drives the strained dynamic between the two as Maverick tries desperately to prevent history from repeating.