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Most actors are guarded -- literally and figuratively -- but Bradley Cooper isn't most actors.
Open and articulate, Cooper stars in The Hangover, a much-anticipated comedy that opens in theatres tomorrow. It's about a group of men who travel to Las Vegas for a bachelor party, and then get so out of control that they lose the groom. Cooper is the leader of the pack, and his co-stars are Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis and Justin Bartha. The Hangover is shaping up to be the hit comedy of the summer.
Cooper, 34, has worked steadily for the last decade in TV and film (and theatre), starting off with an appearance on an episode of Sex and the City. He became a regular on TV's Alias and Nip/Tuck and starred in such hit films as Wedding Crashers, Yes Man and He's Just Not That Into You. Although he's been a working actor since he finished up his Masters of Fine Art degree from the Actors Studio Drama School (at the New School in New York), Cooper says his real acting education started in childhood.
"What made me want to be an actor was growing up right across the street from a movie theatre, and having a father who's a real cinephile," says the Philadelphia native.
"He turned me on to those 1970s auteur movies. I was really young. I remember seeing The Elephant Man when I was like, 12, and Apocalypse Now, Network and The Deer Hunter. I loved those movies so much. I would just sort of live in the fantasy of whatever the feeling was after the movie was over. Living next next to a movie theatre, that was utopia. I think it was a real influence."
Cooper says he grew up Catholic in an Irish/Italian family with working class roots, but that sounds a bit like the family folklore version of events. His father broke the blue-collar mould with a college education, says Cooper, and created a different sort of life for the actor and his sister.
Talking about ambition, Cooper says, "I always knew where I came from, and idolized my father and what he achieved, and I felt, from a really early age, a real need to take whatever progress he had made to the next level. I didn't really know what that meant, but I always had a huge engine inside, a real work ethic. Since I was 15, I've always had a job. I worked as a busboy at a Greek restaurant while I was going to high school, just because I wanted to have my own money, and work, and whatever that gave me, that sense of fulfilment. And I think it ties into what I always thought it was to be a man."
Cooper seems to have thought all the right thoughts about what it is to be a man. But what has he thought about being a celebrity?
"Luckily, you're catching me at a time when I haven't dealt with it at all," he says. "It's not a reality in my life. Outside of this press tour I've been on for 14 days, my life is really normal. I was just home with my parents in Philadelphia on a day off. There's no difference in my life from before I did Wedding Crashers or Alias, and after. I don't feel like a celebrity. I don't have to curtail any of my behavior."
Then he adds, "I was at the airport yesterday and three guys came up to me and accosted me, and they'd only seen the TRAILERS for The Hangover. I've definitely never experienced that kind of enthusiasm before. It was, ah, aggressively friendly. Anyway, my hunch is that I won't have to change my life at all. I could be totally wrong." Cooper politely declines to confirm or deny rumours that he has been cast to play the lead role in The Green Latern. Watch for him later this year in All About Steve (with Sandra Bullock), in Case 39 (opposite Renee Zellweger) and co-starring with Robin Williams in The Prince of Providence.