Bradley Cooper knows that there’s no chance in hell that he could win an Oscar for Maestro, but I’ve enjoyed watching his attempts to campaign like he has a real shot. This man has been doing the most, from making sure everyone knows he’s dating Gigi Hadid to crying with Leonard Bernstein’s family in an interview to doing an Armchair Expert interview. Bradley and Dax Shepard have known each other for years and they talked a lot about fatherhood on the podcast. Bradley got “real” about the fact that he didn’t really feel connected to his daughter Lea when she was a baby. Some highlights:
He wasn’t sure if he loved Lea when she was a baby: “The first eight months — I don’t even know if I really love the kid. It’s dope. It’s cool. I’m watching this thing morph. That’s my experience. Fascinated by it. Loved taking care of it. But would I die if someone came in with a gun?”
Later, he realized that he did love his daughter: Cooper went on to explain that he underwent a realisation a few months into her life, recalling that “all of a sudden, it’s like no question”.
Now fatherhood is his reason to live: “I’m not sure I’d be alive if I wasn’t a dad. I don’t know. I just needed someone to say, like, ‘We’re gonna drop this massive anchor. I’m like, ‘Why? We’re speeding! I just got an upgrade on the boat, and I know where the wind’s coming in.’ They’re like, ‘No, no, no, there’s a tsunami coming in, and you need an anchor and we’re gonna drop it.’ Because this is gonna dictate everything you do from now on. Your DNA is going to tell you that there’s something more important than you.”
Whether Lea will end up with a man like him: “I think about that a lot, in terms of how does my relationship with my daughter impact her growth and the journey that she’s going to be on? And specifically romantically in life, wherever intimacy finds her. I’ve clocked that she’s going to be 7 in March. You know my relationship with my dad, [I didn’t ] spend a lot of time with him. I think I’ve already logged more hours with my daughter than I did with my dad his entire life. So that alone is bonkers.”
[From People & The Independent]
There are a lot of people criticizing Bradley for talking about not feeling connected to his child, but isn’t that a somewhat common experience for first-time parents? Granted, usually it doesn’t take eight months to feel the connection, but the disconnected feeling is pretty common. Besides, there are always photos of Bradley out with Lea in New York – he absolutely adores his daughter, he’s a hands-on father and you can tell that they’re very connected now.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
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- Bradley Cooper and daughter Lea De Seine run errands. Featuring: Bradley Cooper and daughter Lea De Seine Where: New York, New York, United States When: 31 Oct 2023 Credit: BauerGriffin/INSTARimages
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- Los Angeles special screening of Netflix’s ‘Maestro’ at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Featuring: Lea De Seine Shayk Cooper, Bradley Cooper Where: Los Angeles, California, United States When: 12 Dec 2023 Credit: Faye’s Vision/Cover Images
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- Los Angeles special screening of Netflix’s ‘Maestro’ at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Featuring: Lea De Seine Shayk Cooper, Bradley Cooper Where: Los Angeles, California, United States When: 12 Dec 2023 Credit: Faye’s Vision/Cover Images
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- Los Angeles special screening of ‘Maestro’ Featuring: Bradley Cooper, Lea De Seine Shayk Cooper Where: Los Angeles, California, United States When: 12 Dec 2023 Credit: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Abaca Press/INSTARimages **NORTH AMERICA RIGHTS ONLY**
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- Celebrities arrive at the 35th Annual Producers Guild Awards at The Ray Dolby Ballroom in Hollywood, California Featuring: Bradley Cooper Where: Hollywood, California, United States When: 25 Feb 2024 Credit: Jeffrey Mayer/Media Punch/INSTARimages
Some things just don’t need to be said out loud
Exactly…
Doing himself no favours here.
On the contrary, I think it’s good to talk about it and normalize it to a point, so people don’t feel like they are crazy/pariahs/etc.
I agree completely. A lot of people feel this way and feel guilty for not having that initial connection. It’s important for parents to talk open about this, especially mothers. Moms are shamed the most.
I think it’s an important topic, too. Not everyone has that automatic immediate parental bond. It takes some people longer to adjust and feel that and that’s OK and we need to let people know that’s OK.
Couldn’t agree more.
I very much agree, fathers and mothers go through so much when they have a baby and society puts so much pressure on parents to do it ‘right’. We have to normalise the whole range of emotions people can experience and how they can evolve.
This kind of thing definitely should be said out loud. This is a common experience that both new fathers and mothers can have.
Normalizing ALL of the experiences of parenthood is really important.
I understand saying this to your friends in private, but not necessarily to a reporter.
I think it’s good to normalize different parenting experiences. My first had colic, cried the entire time he was awake. Never latched, never rested his head on me, never fell asleep in my arms. It was awful and I did not feel connected to him at all.
That being said, do we need to illustrate the idea by saying you wouldn’t mind if an intruder murdered your child?? What is that?? I would have taken a bullet for my son without a second thought whether we bonded or not. He was my son!
Yeah, him saying he didn’t know if he would take a bullet for his daughter was an odd thing to say. And calling her “thing” was…….weird. It’s normal to not feel connected at first but his choice of words was awful. His daughter will read this when she is older.
I agree that not every parent feels an instant bond with their baby and no parent should be shamed for that. Also, newborn babies are freaking weird lol–they’re just kinda like little spuds that don’t do much beyond gurgling. To me, they become more fun with every month as they become more interactive, expressive etc.
I don’t have a problem with anyone making that point but MY GOD, this is not how you do it. It’s the way that he phrased it: calling the baby “it”, “thing”, essentially saying that if someone came at his baby with a gun, he doesn’t know if his instinct would be to protect her?!?! It’s all SO. F*CKING. BAD.
So while I don’t disagree with the idea of normalizing very normal parental thoughts, there’s a way to communicate that…at least a little f*cking tact please.
Yeah I agree that it is definitely a lot more common not to feel connected at first than people want to believe or admit. My emergency c section premie son who was in the NICU is still the child that I feel the least connected too and I think it also has to do with the trauma that we went through with his birth. We’ve both been to therapy and of course I love him and do anything for him but there will always be this “thing” as a part of our relationship because it’s started with trauma. The one thing I think is crazy for him to say is the gun thing. If I was in a room with kids that weren’t even mine of course I would try to save them first. I think about teachers during school shootings and yeah I would be sacrificing myself for kids but that’s just me.
Wasn’t Angelina Jolie pilloried for referring to Shiloh as a blob when she was also just a few months old? And we all know Angelina loves all her children very much.
Oh my god, THIS! Someday that adorable little girl is going to grow up and maybe she’ll read that for nearly the first year of her life, her dad didn’t think he’d take a bullet for her.
I had a c-section with my son and the very second I woke up, my first thought was him. He was my total priority then and now. I cannot imagine thinking I didn’t know whether or not I’d take a bullet for him. Bonkers.
Barbara/MSS – “Bonkers” is an unkind thing to say. Many new parents struggle in the first months postpartum and Bradley is doing a lot here to help those who might feel alone realize that they are not, and there’s nothing wrong with them. I’m so glad YOU didn’t have that experience, but try and imagine if you did? Shame.
I think what matters to his daughter is that he loves her and has been/ is present in her life since then. As Kaiser pointed out and Bradley himself mentioned, he’s “already logged more hours with my daughter than I did with my dad his entire life”. So he’s very much aware of his responsibility and is correcting the mistake of his father. Compare it to Tom Cruise who was only there during the first years of his daughter’s life and has been absent since then. I think Bradley’s daughter will be better off reading about/ knowing about this interview than Suri when she reads the magazines of Tom Cruise saying he loves her when she was a baby but she never experienced it.
Once again – saying nothing was sitting right there.
No. People need to de-stigmatize this. A lot of parents feel this way and the idea that they are MEANT to feel overwhelming love immediately makes them feel like failures and bad people.
It’s the EXACT opposite. Real feelings should always be freely shared. Maybe that way others won’t feel such deep shame for experiencing the same thing.
There is NOTHING wrong with how he felt and however he feels today. The point is he is a present father and was EVEN when he may not have felt connected. That should be celebrated.
Women kill themselves post-partum because they don’t feel that instant connection with their child and feel inadequate, wrong, abnormal, etc.
This should be said out loud.
I disagree. It’s perfectly natural for parents to not feel an instant bond with their newborns. That’s our evolutionary heritage. He’s not the only one who’s felt that way. If he can let other parents know that they’re not alone, he will have done the world a service.
It often takes a while for new parents (including mothers) to feel a connection to their babies. It isn’t as unusual as some people think & I don’t fault BC for admitting it.
By my understanding this is not unusual.
I wonder if dad’s experience this more because they don’t have the physical experience that the mom does growing and birthing the child? But I’ve heard of moms struggling with this as well.
I hope his daughter doesn’t read this some day and be hurt. Maybe he thinks it will help others who have the same issues? I imagine this is incredibly painful to experience.
honestly, when my friends were having babies after me (I was one of the first in my circle) that was one of the things I would tell them – you may not love the baby immediately and that’s okay. I had a rough birth with my first and then I had PPD that I never got treatment for……I remember clearly my husband coming home one night from work as I was nursing the baby in his room (it was around 7 or 8 at night) and I just cried “I dont think I love him, I’m an awful mother!”
And then maybe around 4 or 6 months I just fell in love. So I told all my friends that because no one told me, and the guilt I felt over not having that immediate love for him just made me feel worse, like I was broken or something was wrong with me. Had someone said “you may not love the baby right away” I think it would have helped a great deal.
So basically I love this interview bc I think its important for new parents to hear that you may not have that instant love for your baby, and it doesn’t mean you’re a bad parent and it doesn’t mean you and your child aren’t going to have a wonderful relationship. That feeling will come.
We posted the same time, your journey mirrors mine.
Becks, thanks for sharing. It’s incredibly important to let people know they’re not alone in this incredibly confusing and emotionally fraught experience.
Not feeling an immediate bond is normal, but not being sure if you’d take a bullet for your baby? Makes him sound like a sociopath.
Yeah, I thought the very specific description he offered up was a little weird 😂
I think lots of people talk about their love for their kids in the context of “I would die for them” so that didn’t strike me as weird at all.
I understood the connection he was making in terms of other parents using that example. But maybe I think most parents WOULD take a bullet for their kid even if they don’t feel instantly bonded to the child. I think there are some things parents are willing to do even if they don’t like their kids that much (I assume dislike does occur, especially when the kids are teenagers haha). Or maybe I’m being too optimistic .
So the context of the bullet makes sense if you’re willIng take one for the team. If you don’t want to take that bullet, I’d just avoid mentioning it out loud 🤣
I love my kids to pieces but the idea of would I take a bullet for them is still hard for me to wrap my head around. Anyway, my initial reaction was oh boy why verbalize any of this, but my second reaction was more like, well, these are normal feelings and it can be helpful to know that others feel the same way and it doesn’t mean that will be your feeling toward your kid forever. I’m pregnant with number 3 and I never felt bonded with or any sort of intense love for any of my kids in utero, but getting to know them on the outside has been amazing and so reassuring that I do in fact love them to pieces. The length of time it took me to bond was pretty different between 1 and 2 and I’m guessing 3 will be different as well but this time I know that it will come eventually if it’s not there right away.
Some have trouble bonding.
It’s hard on everyone but it’s a worthy conversation.
Having a baby is so life changing, it’s not at all like it is in the movies.
You don’t (usually) move to the country & start an organic applesauce business.
I fault his “logged in” language. He’s so… tries way too hard & it’s so obvious.
I don’t enjoy his acting, his personality, but I do identify with the bonding part. I had ppd & it was rough.
Some women talked about not feeling attached emotionally to their baby at the start after having children through surrogate. I understand why people would say he shouldn’t have said it out loud, but I think for anyone feeling the same way it would make it better to know, what they are feeling isn’t abnormal, other people experience that too. When it comes to being a parent, the situation like this makes people feel very guilty if they aren’t experiencing things as the society tells it. It is good to normalize talking complicated side of being a parent.
None of the parents I have know or myself and husband didn’t love a child until so many months old. We loved ours before even giving birth. In fact my husband would come home from work and greet my belly first lol. He was all in. He probably should have kept his mouth shut about this.
My mother told me when I was a teenager that it took her months to love my older brother, her first kid. She said she was going through the motions of caring for him but felt like a robot. Then one day she she was watching him sleep and it hit her like a brick to the heart and she wept at the enormousness of her love. Its normal and my brother an I never thought it was strange at all. I’m sure Bradleys daughter has heard the story too. The gun thing was a bit too much in my opinion but maybe he was being funny or something.
Why would he need to keep his mouth shut? It’s a very common experience and knowing it’s common will improve is so reassuring to parents going through this. I had my second son 6 months ago. I am so in love with my older child that it took months to understand how to have the same love for two children. Thanks to my support system, who allowed me to be open about this and work though it at my own pace, I have a lovely bond with both sons. Making statements about how you must love your child more than others is foolish. Parenting is not sacred, we are allowed to have a spectrum of emotions related to it.
Lol
I guarantee someone felt a lack of bond.
What they also felt was the judgement that accompanies admitting anything but being absolutely in love with their child, or with the fetus.
More like, they hid their feelings and faked enthusiasm while feeling inadequate as a parent already.
You can still love your child, and not feel connected to them after they’re born. It can be due to many reasons: post partum depression, anxiety, stress of new parenthood. The newborn phase is wild, and I don’t blame him. More people should talk about this issue.
I have only felt head over heels at first sight for one of my kids (the 3rd of my 4) – the one that had the quickest and least painful delivery, lol. I was also dreadfully ill throughout that pregnancy (and she was 2 weeks late) which, no joke, cleared up as soon as she exited my body. I think I was just so grateful to be feeling well again that I had a greater capacity for love, haha. The lack of immediate bond was distressing to me the first time, but by the last, I knew that “faking it” till it was genuine would really work. So, no issue with his feelings on not feeling it right away.
But “But would I die if someone came in with a gun?” 🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️ Christ. I hope the poor kid does not read this quote one day.
I also did the “fake-it-til-it’s-real” thing with my second kid, and now we are inseparable. I think it’s hugely important that we normalize this conversation. It happens to way more than we acknowledge. Plenty to criticize Bradley about, but not this.
Now, is he talking about his daughter or his relationship with his daughter when he says “this thing” and “it” ?
I read it as becoming a parent as a whole.
This thing we call being a parent, a father, it’s a lot.
Like that.
It sounds pretty vague and he seems like the kind of person who would talk of his own child like that.
It is okay to say this out loud. It doesn’t make him a bad father, it just means he had difficulty finding attachment and he had to grow into it. That’s a perfectly valid and healthy experience with love of any kind.
Can’t stand the man, but appreciate his openness here.
I think it isn’t unusual, but I know he’s going to get a lot of criticism for saying it. I’m neurodivergent & I sometimes wonder if Bradley Cooper might be as well. He mostly comes across to me as just really earnest but it seems to grate on people.
The bullet comment is what I stared at in puzzlement. It seemed kind of too private as a thought to mention out loud.
Plus, he actually admits he liked taking care of the baby. But STILL woundn’t take a bullet? The comment sounded contradictory.
That was a a slightly confusing interview( (not the part about him being unsure if he loved his daughter right away), maybe I’d have to listen to the whole podcast for the context and it would be better hearing it aloud. Not sure I understood the whole boat and anchor thing.
But the not feeling instantly connected to your baby after birth, I feel this is something a lot of parents can relate to. I’m not a mom myself but I have heard some of my friends who are parents talk about how they didn’t fall in love instantly with their kid. It makes sense to me. Some may feel that instant connection even before birth. But some mothers have difficult pregnancies or post-partum depression and it takes awhile to build that bond. You enter the hospital and give birth essentially to a little stranger you are expected to take home and care for. You have to learn their likes and dislikes, their personality, their habits, and all that. I had a coworker who gave birth to twin girls a few years ago and she adjusted pretty well to motherhood but she said her husband struggled with postpartum depression (yes, it can affect men too) and to the adjustment of being a dad. He’s fine now and is an involved dad. I do think Bradley was inelegant in the way he phrased some of the things like admitting aloud “would I take a bullet for this baby?” I think that was a bit much.
I was 19 when I got pregnant (oopsie!) barely 20 when I gave birth to my daughter. I had a mild case of the “baby blues” and didn’t really feel a bond until she was about 3-4 months old. I told myself at the time that it’s because I was so young and I wasn’t ready to become a parent. It felt normal to me to feel that way.
Bradley has always been an odd duck, he thought being a dick would ingratiate him to other actors. To the point, Will Arnett had to sit him down and tell him to STOP being such an ahole. He had no idea what he was doing was inappropriate.
I don’t mind him sharing his parenting experience. But I do know how cruel kids can be. And if her classmates read it. I can see them having a field day over her rich, famous dad not loving her and the fallout from that.
Maybe there was a more elegant way to share the story. But BCoop is gonna BCoop.
Saw that little girl interacting with people on the red carpet. She is a natural. Defo nepo baby but maybe with some talent in her future.
I think it’s okay to admit you didn’t feel connected at first.
But… there’s the fact that he’s super famous and that story will live on the web forever… and maybe his 7-yo’s classmates will hear about it (or a bully)…
So maybe he could have expressed the same idea without saying he didn’t know if he loved her or that he wasn’t sure he’d physically defend his infant daughter from mortal danger.
Oh the narcissism of many actors….must be nice to not care about anyone but yourself.
Glad he said what he said. Gives hope to men about to walk out of their kids lives forever due to not feeling immediately attached. Give it togetherness and time.
Given that some people think his relationship with the child’s mother was contracted for PR purposes (to make him look more respectable to Academy voters and quash any unwanted rumors), it’s not surprising that he wouldn’t bond with the child right away. I’m glad that they are connected now.
I can understand being a new parent and having a bit of a learning curve or even an adjustment period because there’s a new tiny human in your life. I can even understand having difficulty establishing a bond with your new child (not the case for me personally) but to go on a public platform and call your child a “thing” and “it” and question if you’d make the ultimate sacrifice for them blows my mind. It’s not always about what you say but how you say it and Bradley Cooper was callous. I hope like hell his daughter never hears that podcast episode. Some things really don’t need to be shared with everyone and imo he should’ve kept that between him and his therapist
I bonded quickly with my first but my second was a big struggle. I had horrible PPD with him. At the same time, I never called him “thing” or “it”. I also knew that I would protect him if he were threatened. If I felt extremely strong negative emotions I would gently put him down in his crib and walk away, sometimes just to the bathroom and turn on the fan while in the shower, sometimes I would just go walk off in the rain at night while my husband was home because I couldn’t even be in the house. He screamed A LOT.
That “take a bullet” remark was a strange thing to say BUT – I wonder if he was experiencing PPA and one of the catastrophic scenarios he played in his head was a shooting. It would explain his thought process and also his decision to share as a way of spreading awareness. 7 to 9 percent of fathers have PPD/PPA, so it’s even less known than it is for moms. We all react differently to our feelings and it sounds like he chose to internalize that at the time and is now feeling like he can/should share.
Listen to the whole interview. I did and it’s perfectly fine. He’s a recovering addict – sober for a number of years – and he’s talking about how having a child gave him a new anchor outside of himself.
I think it’s awesome he expressed himself honestly. Who cares if you would have said it differently- it’s not your experience.
Also Dax isn’t a reporter – he does a long form interview/conversational podcast and he’s friends with BCoop.
I’m a parent and I see nothing wrong with what he said. A lot of parents, like it or not, will feel relieved and seen by his comment. Let’s not get up in arms about the semantics. He’s expressing that he didn’t immediately feel that sense of “I would die for you” which a lot of people express when they become parents. I think he’s doing a good thing by being honest. It would be great if more women could normalise these feelings too. It took time for me to feel bonded with my baby too.
I don’t find Bradley Cooper’s response remotely surprising. He has always struck me as someone who can only love himself. He likes to be adored by others but it only works one way with him. It’s been on display in every relationship he’s been in.
He needs a lot of external validation for sure, but that doesn’t exactly come from a place of self-love.
Yeah, I agree that normalizing these types of feelings is good thing because you don’t feel stigmatized by them, but I have a big problem with calling your child “it”, “thing”, and saying you wouldn’t take a bullet for them when they were a baby. That’s just some weird shit.
A lot of people say that the worst loss you can experience is the loss of a child or outliving your own child.
In that sense I can see why the bullet comment would gain traction.
Maybe I was surprised by his comment because there are times I’ve seen on the news where adults have been shown to have a protective instinct for kids they’re not even related to (.ie teachers during a shooting or grown adult men who out of the blue do something sacrificial during a time of crisis like a fire). And yet here he had to debate in his own mind whether he’d do this for his own child. Note — I’m only saying I am surprised, not that he’s not entitled to his feelings.
Nothing wrong with not connecting your kid right away. It happens a lot. Bonding can take time.
I do take issue with him calling her “it.” That’s weirdly dehumanizing and I really hate it.
Didn’t Angelina Jolie also get a lot of grief for referring to Shiloh as a blob? I agree with all those who advocated that Cooper should not be judged and experiences like these should be destigmatised – including his mention about the gun. As Kaiser mentioned (and Cooper himself mentioned), he’s very much present in his daughter’s life since those first few months. He seems like a good father so it can be expected that he’ll mention this himself to his daughter when she’s old enough and it won’t devastate her since she’s experienced nothing but his love and attention. I think this is what matters most. Compare it to Tom Cruise who acted/ presented himself such a loving father during Katie Holmes’ pregnancy and the early years of his daughter’s life. Yet, does not even contact her in the past years until the present. Suri will read the past magazines of her father saying he loves her yet she never experienced it.
Given that child mortality was something like 50% for most of human history, I’m not surprised that humans evolved some emotional detachment during the most sensitive time.
Apologies for the repeated posts. I think something is wrong on my end.
He didn’t say it in the best way, perhaps, but what he expressed is a common feeling for new parents, especially fathers. And they feel guilty as if there’s something “wrong with them” because they don’t feel completely in love with their child right away. It shouldn’t be a taboo to discuss. On the other hand, why is it that every time he opens his mouth, it just seems like he’s begging for people to talk about him? Very over-sharing Dax & Kristen vibes.