Bradley Cooper stole my heart — not in The Hangover movies but in Silver Linings Playbook, in which he gave a strikingly accurate portrayal of what it’s like to live with bipolar disorder.
Now he’s reuniting with Playbook co-stars Jennifer Lawrence and Robert De Niro and director David O. Russell for Joy, a dramedy about a mother who invented the Miracle Mop and her struggles raising three children. Cooper plays an executive at Home Shopping Network, which hawks the product.
Russell is coming off his high as director of the intensely successful, award-winning American Hustle, which also featured a cameo by De Niro.
But a little known fact about Bradley Cooper is that he is a recovering addict. However, he has not disclosed what kind of drugs he was addicted to, aside from alcohol.
In 2006 at age 29, he got sober after a divorce from actress Jennifer Esposito.
“I don’t drink or do drugs at all anymore,” Cooper told The Hollywood Reporter. “Being sober helps a great deal.”
But before he got sober, there was quite the drunkalog.
“I was at a party and deliberately bashed my head on the concrete floor — like, ‘Hey, look how tough I am!’ And I came up, and blood dripped down,” he said to THW. “And then I did it again. I spent the night at St. Vincent’s Hospital with a sock of ice, waiting for them to stitch me up.”
Insecurity comes part and parcel with being an addict, and Cooper was not immune.
“I was so concerned what you thought of me, how I was coming across, how I would survive the day,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I always felt like an outsider. I just lived in my head. I realized I wasn’t going to live up to my potential, and that scared the hell out of me. I thought, ‘Wow, I’m actually gonna ruin my life; I’m really gonna ruin it.'”
His would-be career as an actor was in jeopardy.
“I think work was getting fucked up,” Cooper told GQ. “If I continued [drinking and drugging], I was really going to sabotage my whole life.”
Cooper’s alcohol and drug abuse interfered with his work.
But after getting sober, Cooper took whatever roles he could get, including six episodes on the FX drama Nip/Tuck and a role on a short-lived Fox sitcom based on Anthony Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential. His first lead was in a horror movie called The Midnight Meat Train, and he played opposite Sandra Bullock in 2009’s universally panned All About Steve.
It was no Oscar-caliber work, but it was consistent. And he was happy.
Like many of us addicts when we first get sober, Cooper found sobriety eye-opening. The world seems to tilt in our favor. And we are in the honeymoon phase, floating on a pink cloud.
“I was doing these movies, and I got to meet Sandra Bullock and meet these people and work with them. And I’m sober, and I’m like, Oh, I’m actually myself,” he said. “And I don’t have to put on this air to be somebody else, and this person still wants to work with me? Oh, what the fuck is that about? I was rediscovering myself in this workplace, and it was wonderful. Now, in the back of my head, or in a place of my heart of, like, creativity, did I feel utterly fulfilled? Absolutely not,” he continued. “But I was grateful and happy to be working, and filling that void in smaller moments.”
Cooper would go on to star in his breakout role as one of the entourage in the bachelor-party-in-Vegas comedy The Hangover, which yielded two sequels. He then landed more serious roles, starring in the aforementioned Silver Linings Playbook, a drama with some comedic elements, for which he was nominated for Best Actor at the 2013 Academy Awards. He also starred in the David O. Russell crime dramedy American Hustle, for which he received an Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actor.
Cooper’s talent is through the roof. In sobriety, he’s become a master at his craft. It’s only a matter of time before he wins an Academy Award, and if he continues working with David O. Russell, he just might win one sooner rather than later.
