Bradley Cooper Talks About Going Sober After Years Of Partying, Drug Abuse

Bradley Cooper was afraid for his life, mired in drug addiction and partying that was literally destroying his body. Then he made a decision that would change his life and his career — he would give it all up.

Years of hard partying brought a then 29-year-old Bradley Cooper to the point that he thought, “Wow, I’m actually going to ruin my life; I’m really gonna ruin it,” The Hollywood Reporter revealed in an article in its September 14 issue. Before his decision to get sober, Cooper was to the point that he was not only harming his body with drugs but literally beating himself up.

“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,” Cooper recalls of his darker days. “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.”

Now 37, Cooper has been sober for nine years and has turned his career around along with his life, The Huffington Post reported. After his breakout role in 2005’s Wedding Crashers, he has become a leading man with roles in The Hangover, The A-Team, Limitless, and the recently released Hit and Run.

The Hollywood Reporter feature on Bradley Cooper also unveiled a complicated artists with much more depth than his frat boy on-screen persona shows. Cooper, who said he has identified with Elephant Man inspiration Joseph Merrick since he was a teenager, wrote his college thesis on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. He also said he he prefers books like Milan Kundera’s Immortality and loves films like the French classic Hiroshima Mon Amour.