Bradley Cooper has come to the rescue to take a fellow actor to the hospital not once, but twice.
In a recent appearance on “The Graham Norton Show,” Cooper and his “Maestro” co-star Carey Mulligan opened up about their first meeting — and how it led to a trip to the emergency room.
Cooper recalled going to see the first preview of Mulligan’s one-woman show in New York City. However, when he went to see her backstage after the show, he noted something was awry when he found her lying down.
“It was a small theater, so there wasn’t even a room, it was just a curtain. And then she was prone because one of the sets had hit her in the top of the head halfway through the play,” he explained. “It was crazy. And then I went back and I was like, ‘Are you OK?’ And she was not OK at all.”
Cooper ultimately took Mulligan to the emergency room, noting that the dramatic moment was their introduction to one another.
“The Promising Young Woman” star remembered the incident in detail, recalling that she was nearing the end of the play when she was hit on the head. No one in the audience had seen the moment as it occurred during a blackout in the play, so she carried on with her performance as if nothing had gone wrong.
“And then it finished, and I got off stage and I just burst, I couldn’t stop crying,” she said. “I thought I was really a goner. You get it in your head with a head injury. You’re like ‘Well, that’s it,’ and then I was sobbing on the floor.”
Mulligan said the director of the play was trying to pacify her before another person arrived to let her know that Cooper wanted to meet her. Cooper then took her to the emergency room.
“The nurse was delighted,” Mulligan joked.
It wasn’t a first for Cooper, though.
Fellow guest Bryce Dallas Howard then jumped in and asked the actor about the time he also helped Brooke Shields during a time of need.
Cooper explained that he had accompanied Shields, his neighbor, in an ambulance en route to the hospital after she had fallen at a restaurant nearby.
The “Endless Love” star first told her side of the story during a November 2023 interview with Glamour, revealing that she experienced a “full-blown grand mal seizure” at a restaurant less than a week before her own one-woman show “Previously Owned by Brooke Shields” opened at Café Carlyle.
She called that everything had started to “go black” and that she went “headfirst into the wall.”
“The next thing I remember, I’m being loaded into an ambulance,” she continued. “I have oxygen on. And Bradley f—— Cooper is sitting next to me holding my hand.”
Shields said she struggled to “get any words out,” but she thought to herself, “This is what death must be like. You wake up and Bradley Cooper’s going, ‘I’m going to go to the hospital with you, Brooke,’ and he’s holding my hand.”
Cooper got involved in the situation after a sommelier at the restaurant tried to reach her husband, Chris Henchy. His assistant ultimately called Cooper to explain that Shields was “on the ground” and her husband wasn’t nearby to help.
In response to the incident, Cooper told Extra at the 2023 Gotham Awards, “I was happy to be in the right place at the right time.”
