Oh, Bradley Cooper. I kind of love the guy. He’s a good actor, although I get the feeling he’s probably pretty strange in real life. Who knows? But I kind of like that he doesn’t seem to have a problem with half of America thinking he’s gay, and that his boyfriend is Victor Garber. I like that he doesn’t have a problem being quoted saying “A dick is harmful. A dick is hurtful” to Details Magazine, where he is the June cover boy (I think – he might be July’s cover boy, I can’t tell). The photo shoot is nice, I suppose. Nothing really fancy, just Bradley with longish hair, in various shades of blue and grey, best for his coloring. Anyway, he’s promoting The A-Team (I told you promo was gearing up). Here are some highlights from the article (full piece here):

On his role as Face, a.k.a. Lieutenant Templeton Peck, “a suave con man and lovable dickhead” in The A-Team: “Now, a douche… he’s just an idiot. He’s lame. A dick is a hurtful douche.”

Book he’s reading: Cooper is reading Christopher Buckley’s Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir, that book written by William F. Buckley’s politically estranged son.

On not being the cool kid growing up: “I never lived the life of ‘Oh, you’re so good-looking,’ ” Cooper says. “People thought I was a girl when I was little, because I looked like a girl—maybe because my mother would keep my hair really long in a bowl cut. I was in a coffee shop once and the waitress was like, ‘What do you want, Miss?’ I was 10 or 11—the worst age to have that happen. I had a jean jacket on and a Metallica pin. I thought I was really cool.”

On playing with big-boy guns on The A-Team: “I f-ckin’ loved it,” Cooper says. “I rowed crew in college, and it’s very much the same thing—you feel like you’re part of some other mechanism. It’s very powerful. And there’s so much in it that’s symbolic, for a boy, for a man. I never felt more safe and calm than when I had 300 rounds of ammo and a f-ckin’ M4 around my neck.”

On becoming an action star: During one shoot for The A-Team in Vancouver, he says, “me and Liam Neeson were supposed to be helicoptering down into Baghdad with f-cking guns and the wind machines blowing. So I’m hanging on and there’s f-cking Liam Neeson and I got a gun and there’s music playing and it’s as if I’m making a movie. But actually I am making a movie. It was so f-cked-up. It was very surreal.”

On transforming his body: “I had to literally transform my body,” he explains—for six months prior to filming and during the shoot, the already fitness-obsessed actor cut out sugar, salt, and flour and underwent grueling two-hour workouts with a trainer every day. “As the movie progressed, I got in increasingly better shape,” he says. “There’s this one fight scene with Liam Neeson toward the end, where it’s, like, the apex of the work. We finished and Joe’s like, ‘Brother, come here, look at this,’ and he played it back, and I swear to God, it looked like my head was digitally superimposed onto someone else’s body. I was like, ‘This cannot be me—that’s the way I look?’ It was so f-cking surreal, ’cause as a kid I only fantasized about looking that way. Remember Soloflex commercials? That was huge when I was a kid. It was like, ‘I wanna be the Soloflex guy. Mom, can we get the Soloflex?’ ”

On his dating life: The delicate self-image is an odd disconnect for a guy who has dated Hollywood beauties, including, reportedly, the Oscar-winning actress Renée Zellweger since 2009. Cooper says he can’t talk about that—he’s strictly mum on the subject: “I just can’t.” He was married to the actress Jennifer Esposito for four months between 2006 and 2007, something he also won’t talk about in detail, although he has said, “It was an experience.” In mid-2009, the tabloids went to town with stories of him romancing America’s Sweetheart, Jennifer Aniston. “I’m reading about me taking Jennifer Aniston to my Bel Air mansion”—he lived in a modest home in Venice, California, then; he has a bigger house in Los Angeles now—”and having a candlelit dinner, and I was like, ‘That’s crazy. Never happened.’ ” He says the next time he saw Aniston, who is a friend, he joked, “Hey, we should hang out—the other dates that we never had went so well.”

[From Details]

There’s a lot more in there, but I was getting a little tired with all of the f-bomb dropping. Sure, I talk like that too, so my interview would probably sound like that as well. But with B.Coop, it does sound like he’s trying to butch it up a bit, right? What’s also funny is that the piece is full of quotes from Bradley’s directors and costars, and they make him sound like the biggest manly-man ever. Is it weird that I’ve never thought of him that way? I like the way I see him too – as a sensitive nice guy. But I guess sensitive nice guys don’t star in big action films.

Photos courtesy of Details Magazine.