Bradley Cooper Is the Least Subtle Question-Dodger In the History of Hollywood
Bradley Cooper is many things: an accomplished actor, common celebrity crush, and beholder of the bluest eyes in show biz. One thing he’s not? Forthcoming.
In a recent interview with The New York Times (you may have heard of them), Cooper kept his personal life in line with its qualifier: personal. The Star Is Born actor-cum-director dodged questions about, well, everything (romance, addiction, fatherhood, love, etc.), and didn’t do so subtly.
“The experience was so incredible, it was such a wonderful, wonderful experience, that it can only go downhill,” Cooper told reporter Taffy Brodesser-Akner.
“I won’t have any control, and it really isn’t a collaboration,” he went on, defending his decision to refuse certain questions. “You have all the say. It’s not like you’re going to show it to me and say, ‘Let’s work on this section.’ You know what I mean?”
With Cooper unwilling to venture down the rabbit hole we call journalism, Brodesser-Akner focused on the film itself, pressing the actor for even the most minute of details, though he’s careful to the extent in which he answers.
Brodesser-Akner writes that Cooper dreamt of the opening scene for A Star Is Born, but he didn’t end up using it — “he won’t tell me what it was because maybe he’ll use it if he’s ever allowed to make another movie,” she adds.
The profile continues in such a vein, with Brodesser-Akner attempting to make lemonade from the measly sliver of fruit Cooper has given her. He refuses to reveal his process, or rather insists that he didn’t have one — he simply was his character, Jackson Mane.
“Any time you do anything, you have to find personal things of yourself, but no, I mean, I felt like I was him. I wasn’t, like, going, like, back to a moment of my life in that scene.”
But the movie isn’t about him, it’s about you — yes, you! He hopes this film can help us all heal. “That’s the whole point of creating art, trying to somehow deal with the desperate reality of being alive, you know?”
And so what, exactly, is this wound Cooper seeks to mend? Unsurprisingly, the Oscar nominee remains vague: “The wound was just the wound of being a human being.”
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Cooper, in an attempt to clarify his stance on publicity, tells Brodesser-Akner, “It’s wonderful that people want to ask me questions. I just find that no matter how much time we spend together, it’s only by spending time and doing something with somebody that you start to get to see how they work and how they interact with other people and who they are, you know? You couldn’t get to know me in this scenario just as much as I don’t know who you are.”
I guess we’ll never truly know the man behind the music(al).