It takes a certain amount of audacity to choose Guantánamo Bay as a vacation destination, but then Bradley Cooper doesn't do R & R like the rest of us. One of the actor's first showbiz gigs was hosting Lonely Planet's Treks in a Wild World, a reality series that found him climbing ice walls in the Arctic Circle and evading civil war in the Andes and Croatia.
"Cuba was practically a party compared to all that," laughs Cooper, 33, who visited Gitmo on a recent USO tour where he met with soldiers and worked the detainee-keeping crowd. "It was something I always wanted to do," he says. "The hardest part was explaining to all the men why they sent me to shake hands and not Jessica Alba."
The troops should have been impressed that Cooper was there at all. He's worked almost nonstop for the past 12 months and has six new films to show for it. Among them are the comedies The Rocker, costarring Rainn Wilson and Christina Applegate, which opens this month, and He's Just Not That Into You, alongside (and occasionally on top of) Scarlett Johansson, which hits this fall. Then comes a thriller opposite Renée Zellweger, a buddy comedy with Jim Carrey, a romance with Sandra Bullock, and so on. All this has kept Cooper from perusing the gossip pages for a while, which is probably best. The actor, known for roles in Wedding Crashers and TV shows like Alias and Nip/Tuck, is freshly divorced from the actress Jennifer Esposito and has the sort of chiseled good looks that make even casual encounters with the opposite sex seem blogworthy. "I'm supposedly dating Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Aniston," he says. "Where would I find the time?"
Cooper didn't start out with a rep as a ladies' man. Growing up on the outskirts of Philadelphia, he says he got into acting because "I really didn't fit in anywhere else." The problem was, "all the cool kids were into the Smiths and the Housemartins and I was into Metallica, Def Leppard, and parachute pants." (He describes his hair in high school as "A Flock of Seagulls.")
Whatever the look, something apparently worked. He started landing regular jobs in commercials before he finished his M.F.A. at the New School. "I got a Wendy's commercial and pretty much thought my fate was sealed," Cooper says. "They flew me to Miami, and I called my mom and dad and said, ‘They put me up in a hotel. Guys, things are going really well.' "
These days, Cooper is most content running on the beach with his two dogs in Los Angeles or kicking back watching Charlie Rose. ("Did you hear his eulogy to William F. Buckley?") The nightstand at his house in Venice is stacked with civic-minded reads like 1776 and The Pocket Book of Patriotism, though that's just one sign of his Philly roots. Part Irish, part Italian, Cooper grew up in a food-obsessed family ("My Italian grandfather ran a garlic business out of his basement") and learned early to make magic with pot and pan. That helped get him the lead role a few years back in the sitcom based on Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, but it also comes in handy in life. "My friends laugh at me," he says. "Sometimes I would rather stay home and make a stromboli than do the whole club-scene thing."
