For Bradley Cooper, being a father is always his No. 1 priority.
During a Thursday, December 21, press conference for his film Maestro, Cooper, 48, looked at his phone and said, per the Daily Mail: “So sorry. The school nurse just called me.”
“Can I just leave the room for a second to call them back and you can keep going?” he asked. “Is that all right?”
When he came back, Cooper explained he had to leave “to go to the school to do something with Lea that needs … I have to apply something that they won’t allow … I have to do it, so it’s, like, a 10-minute walk.”
Cooper shares Lea De Seine, 6, with ex Irina Shayk. The former couple welcomed their daughter two years after they began dating. Cooper and Shayk, 37, eventually called it quits in June 2019.
While Cooper has kept his daughter private, he has shared sweet anecdotes about her through the years — and they even stepped out to walk the red carpet together for the premiere of Maestro earlier this month.
In July, Cooper opened up about using his own life experiences to parent Lea.
“I mean, you learn from your predecessor’s mistakes, and I’ll make tons that hopefully Lea will learn from,” he said in an episode of Running Wild With Bear Grylls: The Challenge. “To help unburden her with any of my bulls–t.”
Cooper went on to praise self-reflection for helping him, adding, “It’s for me too. It just makes life much better.”
Shayk, for her part, spoke candidly to Elle in March 2021 about coparenting with Cooper. “When I’m with my daughter, I’m 100 percent a mother, and when she’s with her dad, he’s 100 percent her dad,” she said. “Coparenting is parenting.”
She also explained her reasoning for keeping her relationship with Cooper out of the spotlight. “My past relationship, it’s something that belongs to me, and it’s private. It’s just a piece of my inner self that I don’t want to give away,” she added.
In November 2021, a source exclusively told Us Weekly that Cooper and Shayk are “incredibly close” and all about building an “amazing coparenting relationship.”
“When Bradley gets breaks from filming, he enjoys being with family,” the insider added. “He and Irina will have dinner together and partake in fun kid-friendly activities that involve their daughter.”
