Actor Bradley Cooper, whose latest film is about the phenomenon of crime in Manhattan, revealed in a new New York Times interview that he was held at knifepoint on a subway last year. Cooper went on to joke that he wasn’t sure why he didn’t kill the perpetrator instead, but said: “I thought, ‘I’m not going to be the guy that kills him, I don’t want to be the guy who kills him.’”
He recounts the incident when he was on a New York City subway with his mother and brother earlier this year. Cooper, 43, said that he needed to go into the store but couldn’t find it. After walking around for about 30 minutes in the cold without his coat, he found himself asking an unidentified guy where the store was. “I go, ‘Hey, man. I can’t find a store that sells wine.’” Eventually the man told him where the store was located, and Cooper went inside the store. Once there, he saw his mother, who was “scrambling over the shelves.” He asked her what she was doing, and she said, “I’m trying to find a large display of alcohol.” Cooper then realized that he was being followed by an unidentifiable man in dark clothing. Cooper continued: “At that point my body went into panic mode. I just covered my face because I thought he was going to shoot me.”
Cooper said that he began to scratch at the man when he noticed that he was holding a knife. He said that his mother was able to calm him down and convinced him to remove his sweatshirt, at which point the man immediately dropped the knife. The perpetrator then asked Cooper for $60, and walked away with the man’s credit card.
Cooper says that he never got the man’s name. When asked what he would have done differently, Cooper said: “I probably wouldn’t have been so stupid and gotten on the train the way I did.”
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