“I don’t know how Hollywood works, but I’m pretty sure that I’m dating Bradley Cooper.”
During her Saturday Night Live opening monologue, the talented comedienne Amy Schumer told a story about hanging out with the dreamy three-time Oscar nominee at the Time 100 Gala. The two were deep in conversation, and every time she got up to leave, Cooper asked her to stay. So, in Tinseltown talk, they’re basically dating.
Appearing on The Howard Stern Show Wednesday, Cooper said Schumer was “amazing,” and confessed to watching the SNL episode online after being alerted to it by his publicist. When pressed by Stern—as is his wont—about whether or not he was indeed hitting on Schumer, the American Sniper star claimed the bit was all in the name of comedy.“[Schumer’s] very attractive,” said Cooper. “She wasn’t [hitting on me] either. It’s a bit. But I do remember her coming to sit down because we had an awkward exchange at the MTV Movie Awards where we didn’t know each other, and she was sort of yelling my name and then I looked over and was like, ‘Hey,’ and then we talked. But at first, it was like, ‘Who is this person screaming at me?’”Cooper later said he confronted Schumer (in jest) on a red carpet about it, and they had a fun chat. “So then I saw her at this [Time 100] event and she came over,” he said. “All that stuff of her getting called and me saying no, no, no—that really happened. I thought I was getting a little creepy because I was making her stay.”
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On the subject of the aforementioned American Sniper, since Cooper sacrificed his upfront pay for a hefty slice of the film’s back-end, when the film ended up grossing $550 million worldwide, the star was in for a very big payday. Somehow, Stern had heard that Cooper ended up pocketing $50 million from Sniper, and after some serious needling, got the actor to admit as much.
“Something… around that,” he said, later admitting he’d “seen a little of it” but is still waiting for the lion’s share of his back-end participation.
Something Cooper’s been getting asked about quite a bit during his press tour for Burnt is his frequent co-star Jennifer Lawrence’s op-ed about the gender pay gap in Hollywood. Last year, The Daily Beast uncovered documents in the Sony hack that stated Lawrence and Amy Adams were being compensated less than their male co-stars in American Hustle, including Cooper, Christian Bale, and most egregiously Jeremy Renner, who doesn’t appear in much of the film.
Stern asked Cooper whether it was “really about sexism, or who’s the bigger star,” claiming that Cooper was “the bigger star and the bigger box office draw” at the time.
“I think it’s two things,” explained Cooper. “Here’s the great thing about the effect of what she did: It started the conversation. And every place I’ve gone the last week for Burnt, that’s all people are asking about, which is great. I’m a huge tennis fan and that’s the one place where, at the end of it, they tell you what the money is as a reward, and they hand you the check…And I remember being a kid, and you’re watching this huge match between these two women, and the difference between the [male and female] check…the disparity is insane. And now, Serena Williams is the biggest tennis star in the world.”
Indeed, it wasn’t until 2007 that Wimbledon began to offer men and women equal prize money.
Of course, no interview with The King of All Media is complete without sex talk, and Cooper was eventually asked point blank by Stern: “When are you [and Jennifer Lawrence] going to have sex?”
He was referring to onscreen sex, of course, and Cooper responded by mentioning how he once said Lawrence was “too young” for him, which some frowned at since his girlfriend at the time was 23-year-old model Suki Waterhouse, who is two years Lawrence’s junior. “Never, I don’t think,” Cooper said of onscreen lovemaking with Lawrence. “I said that [she’s too young] once on the carpet just as a diffuse thing and it became a thing because the girl I was seeing was as young as she was…It just didn’t happen. It’s just not the way we are together.”
