#TeamBrad! Brad Pitt gave a special shout-out to Bradley Cooper at the 2020 National Board of Review awards gala in New York City on Wednesday, January 8.
“Thank you, Bradley. Bradley just put his daughter [Lea, 2] to bed and then rushed over here to do this,” Pitt, 56, said on stage at Cipriani 42nd Street after Cooper, 45, presented him with the Best Supporting Actor trophy for his role in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. “He’s a sweetheart.”
The Ad Astra star told the audience that he “got sober because of this guy, and every day has been happier ever since.” He then gave the A Star Is Born actor a thumbs-up and said, “I love you, and I thank you.”
Pitt spent a year and a half in Alcoholics Anonymous after his September 2016 split from Angelina Jolie, with whom he shares Maddox, 18, Pax, 16, Zahara, 15, Shiloh, 13, and twins Knox and Vivienne, 11. He has been sober ever since.
“I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges,” he told The New York Times in September 2019. “You had all these men [in AA] sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard. It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself. It was actually really freeing just to expose the ugly sides of yourself. There’s great value in that.”
The Fight Club actor previously admitted to GQ Style that he could not “remember a day since I got out of college when I wasn’t boozing or had a spliff.”
“I’m really, really happy to be done with all of that,” he told the magazine in May 2017. “I mean, I stopped everything except boozing when I started my family. But even this last year, you know — things I wasn’t dealing with. I was boozing too much. It’s just become a problem. And I’m really happy it’s been half a year now, which is bittersweet, but I’ve got my feelings in my fingertips again.”
Cooper, for his part, stopped drinking in his late 20s.
“I would never be sitting here with you. No way, no chance,” he said in a 2015 interview with Barbara Walters. “I wouldn’t have been able to have access to myself or other people or even been able to take in other people if I hadn’t changed my life. No way. And I never would’ve been able to have the relationships that I do. I never would’ve been able to take care of my father the way I did when he was sick. So many things.”
