The TV series Bradley Cooper hated being a part of: “He probably would’ve fired me anyway”
Many actors are eternally grateful to their first major role for giving them the springboard to achieve consistent success after it had placed their foot in the door, but Bradley Cooper has the exact opposite feeling over what was comfortably the most significant mainstream part of his fledgling career.
These days, the star has the free rein to pick and choose whatever projects he wants, and as an actor and filmmaker with no less than 12 Academy Award nominations to their name, the focus in recent years has clearly fallen on prestige dramas destined to become a fixture of awards season.
However, more than two decades ago, he was an unproven and relatively untested up-and-comer struggling to gain much in the way of awareness and visibility. He made his on-camera debut in a 1999 episode of Sex and the City, and his first recurring role on the small screen ended in disaster when The Street was pulled from the airwaves in the United States after airing just seven of its 12 episodes.
The same year, he made his first feature film appearance in Wet Hot American Summer, though Cooper struck gold when he was cast as Will Tippin in J.J. Abrams’ spy series Alias. The first season averaged almost ten million viewers across its run, and Jennifer Garner won the Golden Globe for ‘Actress in a Television Series – Drama’ for her performance as Sydney Bristow.
As the best friend and potential love interest of the main character, Cooper’s Tippin was an integral part of Alias from the very beginning. However, as a character who wasn’t heavily involved in the show’s signature espionage-driven shenanigans, he wasn’t an everyday presence on set. That continued into the second season before he ended up asking to be written out of the show entirely.
In the season three premiere, it’s revealed Tippin has been placed into witness protection as an easy way to explain his absence. He did return for a couple of guest spots, but as Cooper told GQ, he’d grown so frustrated by his dwindling importance to Alias that he requested his own removal.
“I would only work three days a week,” he admitted of the first season. “And then for the second season, I got even more side-lined. I was like, ‘Ugh’. And then next thing you know, I was like, ‘I want to fucking kill myself.'” Abrams acquiesced to his unhappy star, but Cooper was so disinterested that if he’d been forced to continue on as part of the Alias ensemble, the showrunner “probably would have fired me anyway.”
Alias ended up running for five seasons, all told, and in a fortuitous turn of events, the first episode of the final stretch premiered just two months after Cooper scored his big-screen breakthrough with a scene-stealing performance in the hit comedy Wedding Crashers.
