Bradley Cooper Admits He Struggled To Feel Connected To His Daughter Lea As A Baby

When Bradley Cooper welcomed his daughter Lea De Seine back in 2017 with ex-girlfriend Irina Shayk, it took him some time to bond with his daughter. Several months, in fact. The actor admitted during a recent appearance on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast that he didn’t really feel connected to his daughter for the first eight months of her life. The tides eventually turned, and Cooper went on to credit Lea with changing the trajectory of his life.

The Oscar-nominated actor shared a very difficult memory with Shepard, admitting that for the first eight months of Lea’s life, he was thinking, “‘I don’t even know if I really love the kid,’” Cooper said on the podcast. “It’s dope, it’s cool, I’m watching this thing morph, and then all of a sudden, my experience was totally that. Fascinated by it, love taking care of it.”

Cooper went on to admit that he wondered if he would die for her if someone “came in with a gun,” and explained that he was thinking, “It’s only been a few months! She could be an a**hole!” Eventually, Cooper found his way to feeling connected with his daughter, telling Shepard that he realized that “DNA is going to tell you that there’s something more important than you.” And that something, of course, was little Lea.

Now, if someone walked in with a gun (which we hope won’t happen), the Maestro actor said there was “no question” he would die for his daughter.

In 2022, Cooper opened up on the Smartless podcast about how significantly fatherhood did change him, even if it took him some time to really connect with his daughter. “Fatherhood is … everything changed,” he said at the time. “Every single thing is absolutely shaded by, or brought into glorious colors, by the fact that I get to be a father to a wonderful human being. ... You have this wonderful thing or breakthrough with a script, or you have a wonderful moment on this set or in an editing room … you have like 40 of those moments every day with your kid, that are that level of joy. That’s not spinning it, that’s just the truth.”

It might not have happened right away, but Bradley Cooper certainly got there in the end as a dad.