Bradley Cooper: I Was So Addicted to Drugs and Alcohol I Banged My Head Against a Concrete Floor

On Purpose. He Banged His Head on a Concrete Floor on Purpose

All those wild times his character, Phil, and friends had on screen in the Hangover movies? That's not how reigning People magazine Sexiest Man Alive Bradley Cooper rolls now, but he says he's certainly familiar with that kind of crazy, out of control partying.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Cooper reveals that he doesn't "drink or do drugs at all anymore," but that that wasn't the case several years before the Hangover franchise launched in 2009.

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One time, Cooper tells THR, "I was at a party and deliberately bashed my head on the concrete floor -- like, 'Hey, look how tough I am!' And I came up, and blood dripped down. And then I did it again. I spent the night at St. Vincent's Hospital (in New York City) with a sock of ice, waiting for them to stitch me up."

That was just one example of how his life was spinning out of control, he says.

"I was so concerned what you thought of me, how I was coming across, how I would survive the day. I always felt like an outsider. I just lived in my head. I realized I wasn't going to live up to my potential, and that scared the hell out of me. I thought, 'Wow, I'm actually gonna ruin my life; I'm really gonna ruin it.'"

Worried friends tried to warn him his lifestyle was going to end badly, Cooper says, but it took a while for him to realize he needed to change.

"Part of me believed it, and part of me didn't," he says. "But the proof was in the pudding: I'd always gotten up at the crack of dawn, and that was out the window. I remember looking at my life, my apartment, my dogs, and I thought, 'What's happening?'"

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Cooper, who will star in a third Hangover movie and is currently generating awards season buzz for his upcoming movies Silver Linings Playbook and The Place Beyond the Pines, doesn't go into detail on how exactly he got sober, but he does talk about his complicated relationship with his father, who died in 2011.

"I was ashamed of so many things," says Cooper, who chose to move away to a private school as a teen. "I didn't want kids to see the house I grew up in, which seems maybe minor now but was a very huge, massive thing."

Check out the THR article, in which Cooper also discusses a childhood ear issue that could have left him deaf and comments, sort of, on his four-month marriage to actress Jennifer Esposito.