Bradley Cooper is speaking on a time when he was held up at knifepoint in New York City.
On Dax Shepard’s latest “Armchair Expert” podcast, Cooper, 46, spoke on the traumatic event which happened on a subway as he was on his way to pick up his daughter, Lea, now 4, at school in October 2019.
“I used to walk around New York City all the time with (headphones) on — this was pre-pandemic. I was on the subway, 11:45, to pick Lea up downtown at Russian school and I got held up at knifepoint,” Cooper began.
“It was pretty insane. But I realized I had gotten way, way too comfortable in the city. My guard was down,” he added.
“I’m all the way at the end of the subway — I would just innately go all the way down to the end — and I felt somebody coming up,” Cooper recalled. “And I thought, oh, they want to take a photo or something.
“I’m up against the post like it’s ‘The French Connection’ or some s—, and then I, like, turned. I looked down and I see a knife,” he continued, recalling the assailant’s knife as being approximately 2 1/2 inches long, with a wooden handle. “I remember thinking, oh, it’s a nice knife,” he said.
Cooper, who shares his daughter with ex-girlfriend Irina Shayk, also recalled the entire incident had a soundtrack as he was listening to music on his own headphones at the time.
“I have my headphones on the whole time. So I can’t hear anything. I’m just listening to music. So it’s scored, the whole thing is scored,” he said, laughing.
When Cooper saw the mugger’s eyes, he was shocked at just how young the boy was. Which is exactly when Bradley began to run.
“I just started booking, just started running,” he said.
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“I jumped over the … turnstile, hid around the white, tiled foyer entrance to the subway, took my phone out. He jumped over, running away, and I took a photo of him. Then I chased him up the stairs. He started running up 7th Avenue. I took two more photographs of him.”
“I ran down two police officers in an SUV, showed them the photograph and I’m, like, talking to them, and the guy kept saying — it was so interesting — he’s like, ‘Are you stabbed?’ I was like, ‘No, no, no.’ And he goes, ‘No, check to see if you’re stabbed.'”
It was that moment Cooper learned that mugging victims are usually so shocked, they don’t realize they’ve been injured.
But thankfully, Cooper was okay, aside from being almost mugged. “It was crazy, bro,” he said.