Bradley Cooper On Drug And Alcohol Abuse: "Work Was Getting F*cked Up"

Bradley Cooper spoke out about his battle with drugs and booze, the Oscars and more in a new cover interview with GQ.


Cooper, 38, had a bad stint with alcohol and other substances in his 20s and revealed to the mag he got clean because "if I continued it, I was really going to sabotage my whole life."

Asked whether it affected his work, Cooper was quoted as saying: "I mean, it has to have. And to this day, of course, because it's a life experience. And all I do is bring life experience. That's all anybody really does. It's inescapable."

"Work was getting f*cked up," Cooper admitted.

Cooper claimed: "The one thing that I've learned in life is the best thing I can do is embrace who I am and then do that to the fullest extent, and then whatever happens, happens. The more steps I do to not do that, the farther I am away from fulfilling any potential I would have."

"So the answer to that question, then, is: Yes, of course it hindered the work," Cooper noted.


When he got sober, everything went fine.

Cooper told GQ: "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. 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 f*ck is that about?""

"I was rediscovering myself in this workplace, and it was wonderful," Cooper declared.

Cooper rose to stardom and he finally earned an Oscar nomination for the film "Silver Linings Playbook", an experience that was surreal.

Cooper reflected: "Did I want to win it? I never thought that I would ever win it. So it wasn't even a question of that."




It might shock people to learn that the leading man is closer to his British major roots than his occasional frat guy on-screen character.

Cooper discussed his first reading of John Milton's epic "Paradise Lost" with reverence.

"Milton, bro? Milton. F*ckin' - that was the end of it. Motherf*cker's 57 or whatever, blind, dictating it to his f*cking daughter-nurse - Paradise Lost? I mean, I just couldn't…That poem f*cking killed me. Satan? That character was un-f*cking-believable. I could taste him in my mouth, dude, reading that. I really, really, for some reason, connected with that poem."



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