Bradley Cooper Refuses to Sell His Soul Just to Sell A Star Is Born

The actor and director would not get personal with the New York Times in a recent interview.

By Corinne Heller Sep 27, 2018 6:02 PMTags
Watch: Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper Talk Taking Risks in "A Star Is Born"

Who is the real Bradley Cooper?

The notoriously private 43-year-old star is on a press tour to promote his new movie A Star Is Born with Lady Gaga. While he has occasionally spoken in the past about personal matters such as his sobriety, the 2011 death of his father, and becoming a father himself (he and partner Irina Shayk welcomed a daughter last year), it looks like he now largely refuses to open up and sell his soul, per se, just to sell his film, which marks his directorial debut.In an uncomfortable-sounding interview with the New York Times, published on Thursday, writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner says that she wanted to ask Cooper about love, fatherhood and how his own sobriety was reflected in his character's drug and alcohol addiction.

She wrote that Cooper told her that she seems nice and that he gets that she is just doing her job but that he was not about to tell her anything truly personal, adding, "I don't necessarily see the upside of it. You know? I don't."

Watch
Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper Talk Taking Risks in "A Star Is Born"

"Turns out the celebrity profile is *not* dead but some people very much wish it were. Please enjoy my story about Bradley Cooper, who made a movie of art and truth and beauty that he will just not explain to me," tweeted Brodesser-Akner.

In the interview, Cooper did get little personal while talking about his father's death again, echoing past comments about how he held him as he took his last breath.

And he was perfectly fine discussing A Star Is Born, talking about how he pitched the remake to Warner Bros. Pictures and how he met with Gaga and cast her in the lead role after watching her perform "La Vie en Rose" at the opening of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Sean Parker's house in Los Angeles in 2016. 

Brodesser-Akner had follow-up questions—she said she wanted to know if anything in A Star Is Born was inspired by a specific relationship, and what he was thinking in the film's final scene.

Cooper was not interested in giving follow-up answers. He said there is no one-to-one correlation of events in his life to events in A Star Is Born.

"It's wonderful that people want to ask me questions," he later said. "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."