Back in 2019, Bradley Cooper was held at knifepoint in a New York City subway station as he was heading to pick up his daughter, Lea, from school, and on a new episode of Dax Shepard’s podcast, Armchair Expert, the 46-year-old actor opened up about the scary moment for the first time. Describing the incident in detail, Cooper provided a valuable case for staying vigilant in New York at all times.
“I used to walk around New York City all the time with [headphones] on — this was pre-pandemic. I was on the subway, 11:45, to pick Lea up downtown at Russian school and I got held up at knifepoint,” he told Shepard, setting the scene. “It was pretty insane. But I realized I had gotten way, way too comfortable in the city. My guard was down,” he noted.
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“I’m all the way at the end of the subway — I would just innately go all the way down to the end — and I felt somebody coming up,” the actor remembered. “And I thought, oh, they want to take a photo or something. I’m up against the post like it’s ‘The French Connection’ or some s—, and then I, like, turned. I looked down and I see a knife.”
Cooper continued, “I remember thinking, oh, it’s a nice knife.” The 36-year-old also recounted that as he was wearing headphones at the time, the entire encounter was colored by his music choices. “I have my headphones on the whole time. So I can’t hear anything. I’m just listening to music. So it’s scored, the whole thing is scored,” he joked.
Thankfully, Cooper was able to escape the incident unscathed, fleeing his younger attacker. “I just started booking, just started running. I jumped over the … turnstile, hid around the white, tiled foyer entrance to the subway, took my phone out. He jumped over, running away, and 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 actor recalled after speaking with police that mugging victims are often in shock and are unaware they had been harmed, and officers urged Cooper to check for stab wounds. “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, no.’ And he goes, ‘No, check to see if you’re stabbed.'” Cooper concluded the story, saying, “It was crazy, bro.”
