A scary experience. During a new podcast interview, Bradley Cooper opened up about a traumatic experience in New York City where he was held at knifepoint in October 2019 on his way to pick up his daughter, Lea.
“I used to walk around New York City all the time with these [headphones] on — this was pre-pandemic — I was on the subway [at] 11:45 to pick Lea downtown at Russian school and I got held up at knifepoint,” the actor, 46, said on the Monday, November 29, episode of the “Armchair Expert” podcast. “It was pretty insane. I realized I had gotten way, way too comfortable in the city. My guard was down. … I was all the way at the end of the subway. Innately, I would just go all the way down to the end. I felt somebody coming up. I thought, Oh they want to take a photo or something. As I turned, I’m up against the post like it’s the French Connection or some s–t, and I turned. I looked down and I see a knife.”
He then recalled that the knife was nearly three inches long and thought it was a “nice knife” with “some history” behind it.
“I have my headphones on the whole time. I can’t hear anything. I’m just listening to music. So it’s scored, the whole thing was scored,” the two-time Grammy winner explained with a laugh. “I can’t remember [what I was listening to]. I look up, I see the person’s eyes, and I’m taken by how young they are.”
Cooper said that although he was taught to never run from a knife, he lifted his elbow and started running toward the exit.
“I just started booking, just started running. I jumped over the turnstile, hid around the white, tiled entrance to the subway [and] took my phone out. He jumped over, running away. 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,” the eight-time Oscar nominee recalled. “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.’ He was like, ‘Check to see if you’re stabbed.’ What happens is people get stabbed and they’re in shock. I looked to see if he was right. … And then I got back on the subway and picked up my daughter.”
The Silver Linings Playlist star shares his 4-year-old old daughter, Lea, with ex-girlfriend Irina Shayk.
