Silver Linings Playback star, Bradley Cooper, says not winning the Best Actor Oscar is unimportant to him. Despite a high quality performance as the bipolar Patrick in which he co-starred with Best Actress winner Jennifer Lawrence, Cooper missed out on the Oscar to a virtuoso performance from Daniel Day Lewis as Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln.
Cooper, who People magazine named as the World's Sexiest Man, tells GQ Magazine in a feature this month that life was put into perspective when he saw his father die two years ago from lung cancer.
“Death became very real. And very tangible. Because my father – someone who had been in my life for 36 years is just f***ing gone,” Cooper recalls.
“I watched him dying and I was there by his bed watching him, breathing with him, and then I saw his last breath and he was gone. I experienced the whole thing. And that was a watershed moment that I was privileged to experience. And it changed everything. Nothing has ever been the same since.”
Cooper says he lost his jitters as a result.
The honours graduate in English Literature from Washington’s Georgetown University told GQ: “You know William Blake’s Songs Of Innocence? Well, right there, in that moment, the innocence was gone. Done. Never to return. The beauty is that I just don’t sweat s*** any more.
“My father gave me two gifts – having me and dying with me. I used to be the kid that got the shakes if I had to talk in public; now, I just don’t get nervous about stuff. I can’t control everything. I watched my father die and I realised that is the way we are all going to die. For me, it was a switch from knowing something intellectually to knowing it by tangibly experiencing it. It rewired my neurological system. It almost did the opposite of motivating me. It was about keeping the main thing the main thing.’
As a result, missing out on an Oscar this month left Cooper completely unmoved.
Cooper may become the latest actor to go behind the camera after signing on to star in, and potentially direct, a remake of the German film Kokowääh.
The original film was Germany's biggest movie of 2011 at the box office. It centres on a carefree bachelor who discovers that his friend's daughter may be his own biological child, resulting from a one-night stand eight years previously. The film's title derives from a poor pronunciation of "coq au vin" by a German speaker.
Silver Linings Playback also co-starred Robert De Niro and Jackie Weaver as Cooper’s parents.
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