Bradley: I relate to the Elephant Man

June 1, 2010

Bradley Bradley: I relate to the Elephant Man


A-Team star Bradley Cooper is an A-list Hollywood hunk these days, but it hasn’t always been that way. “I’ve never lived the life of ‘Oh, you’re so good-looking,’” he says in the June/July issue of Details. In fact, Bradley confesses that when he was a kid, he felt like such an outcast that he felt a special bond with “Elephant Man” Joseph Merrick, a victim of a disfiguring disease who was a sideshow attraction in Victorian England. “I became obsessed with him,” he explains, adding that when he saw David Lynch’s movie The Elephant Man on TV, “I was crying. I couldn’t move. He was a beautiful guy. He had tremendous hope. He struggled to be a man — because he was a man.” Bradley confesses that he’d stare in the mirror and imagine himself to be the Elephant Man, and credits the experience with him wanting to become an actor. His obsession didn’t stop there. Bradley says he “literally went to London and saw the cloak that Merrick wore” and played Merrick onstage for his graduate thesis at the Actors Studio. His connection to Merrick continues even to this day, as Bradley still fixates on his flaws when he looks at his action hero body in the mirror. “Even in that body I’m in, I still saw the flaws, absolutely,” he says, although he laughingly admits he knows it sounds silly. “Oh, this is going to sound like, ‘What a [jerk]. Oh, you really feel like the Elephant Man?’”

 Bradley: I relate to the Elephant Man

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