Before becoming an Oscar-winning mega-star, Bradley Cooper was just another struggling actor in search of role in New York City.
Cooper’s first-ever screen credit, in fact, was playing a guy named Jake who makes a botched attempt to woo Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw in a 1999 episode of “Sex and the City”.
In the scene, Carrie and bestie Stanford Blatch (the late Willie Garson) are out on a drunken bender. After Stanford bails, she winds up drunkenly dancing with an equally intoxicated guy, played by Cooper, who asks if she wants to take a ride in his sports car. She agrees, only to walk home by herself when he stops for cigarettes and a glimpse of a wildly unflattering photo of herself on a magazine cover sobers her up.
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“SATC” writer and director Michael Patrick King discussed the scene during a recent appearance on the “And Just Like That…The Writers Room” podcast, revealing that Cooper told a white lie to land the role — and said lie resulted in a bit of spontaneous script alteration.
“Bradley Cooper — first job — said he could drive a stick to get the job because the character drove a Karmann Ghia,” King said.
“Four in the morning, another Friday outside 14th Street and I said, ‘Bradley, this is where you drive, you take off.’ And he goes, ‘I can’t drive a stick,’” King continued.
“And so we fixed, changed, pivoted,” he added. “Sarah Jessica’s character Carrie crawls out of the Karmann Ghia and walks herself home.”