There is no such thing as an overnight success. Nobody comes from nowhere; especially now that the internet is here to act as a permanent archive of all the false starts and near misses that helped to get you where you are.
You suspect that Bradley Cooper must hate the internet. Far from bursting on to the scene in Wedding Crashers as everyone assumes, his career began with a series of stutters that – given the chance – he probably wishes he could erase. The most recent of these is an excruciating op-ed he wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News as a teenage intern in 1993. But we’ll come to that, because the internet has now racked up enough of Bradley Cooper’s weird pre-fame tangents to necessitate a list. So here are Cooper’s oddest early public moments, ranked from least embarrassing to most embarrassing.
1. Inside the Actors Studio, various
As a student in the Actors Studio Drama School at the New School in New York City, Bradley Cooper got to sit in on various episodes of Inside The Actors Studio. He’s easy to spot, not simply because he spends the entire duration of these episodes in a fixed pose of finger-sniffing concentration, but because he got to ask some of his biggest heroes questions. These included “What was it like to revisit an old character?” (Sean Penn) and “Why did you touch your eyebrow in a certain way in a film in 1990?” (Robert de Niro). Nobody likes to remember themselves as a student, but the fact that De Niro ended up supporting Cooper in Silver Linings Playbook means that this isn’t very embarrassing at all.
2. Sex and the City (1999)
Inexplicably unavailable online, Cooper’s first screen role was a cameo in the second season of Sex and the City. Cooper played Jake, an empty vessel of a plot device only trusted to mumble non-lines like “Wanna light?” and “Wanna go for a ride in my Porsche?” during three or four phases of Sarah Jessica Parker’s ongoing identity crisis. Ultimately he is rejected, but this is no disaster. As it happens, Bradley Cooper in 1999 was fairly close to the finished article, and he acquits himself well in a thankless role. The truth is that he wouldn’t even make the top 10 of most excruciating Sex and the City cameos, although that’s admittedly because all 10 would be taken up by Geri Halliwell.
3. Globe Trekker (2000)
Sex and the City should have been Cooper’s launch pad to acting success. However, here he made a bizarre left-turn, instead choosing to present segments of a travel programme entitled Globe Trekker. The sort of show that gets shown in hotels and on planes, Globe Trekker sent Cooper to spots such as Croatia and West Virginia and asked him to participate in tasks like putting fish down his vest and delivering pieces to camera standing next to roaring jets of water. In Croatia he was sent to a nudist camp. The fact that he kept his shorts on is the only thing keeping this from the top spot.
4. Philadelphia Daily News opinion column (1993)
Intern Bradley Cooper, age 18, wrote in his first @PhillyDailyNews story: "Can best friends who are of the opposite sex hook up with each other without destroying their friendship? In my case, yes . . . so far." Bold. pic.twitter.com/DDyKIFtNqM
— tommy rowan (@tommyrowan) January 23, 2018
And finally, the most recently unearthed and most toe-curling. It’s fine for actors to write for newspapers, but markedly less fine when the actor is a teenager and writes pieces about how it’s excellent that he gets to have sex with his pal. “Can best friends who are of the opposite sex hook up with each other without destroying their friendship?” it begins, before answering “In my case, yes … so far”. The piece goes on to describe how Cooper definitely had sex with a girl named Deborah Landes, but it definitely doesn’t matter because they’re such great chums. “If this happened when we were freshmen at High School, we probably wouldn’t take such a laissez-faire attitude,” Bradley explains. “But because we are both seniors, I realize that we might as well just enjoy the time we have left before we go to college”. He also overuses the word “flow” to describe their relationship, which is unforgivable.
