Bradley Cooper, the star of the blockbuster movie American Sniper, says he prepared for the role of sniper Chris Kyle by strangling 17 men to their deaths.

According to Cooper he used the murders as a method acting technique to help get into the mindset of Kyle.

“I moved in with Kyle’s widow, legally married her and adopted his child. I then abandoned her on four occasions to go out strangling people,” said Cooper. “Then afterwards I wrote a book in which I fabricated a bar fight with Jesse Ventura.”

Cooper said that he arrived at the number 17 by using a complex formula that took into consideration the distance from his prey.

The formula used was the actual number of Kyle’s confirmed kills divided by 50 meters divided by the whites of their eyes divided by the brown of their skin.

“I really wanted to snipe 100 people, but some things you just can’t act,” said Cooper. “Plus, it would have been irresponsible and unsafe for an untrained sniper to just go out attempting to shoot people.”