Bradley Cooper Calls Daughter Lea His 'Anchor,' Admits He's 'Not Sure' If He'd Be Alive Today Without Her

Becoming a father completely changed Bradley Cooper's life.

So much so, the Oscar nominee recently confessed on Dax Shepard's "Armchair Expert" podcast, "I’m not sure I’d be alive if I wasn’t a dad."

“I just needed someone to say, like, ‘We’re gonna drop this massive anchor.’ I’m like, ‘Why? We’re speeding! I just got an upgrade on the boat, and I know where the wind’s coming in,’" the American Sniper star, 49, explained of how things changed when he and ex Irina Shayk welcomed daughter Lea De Seine, 6, in 2017.

"They’re like, ‘No, no, no, there’s a tsunami coming in, and you need an anchor and we’re gonna drop it,’" he continued. "Because this is gonna dictate everything you do from now on. Your DNA is going to tell you that there’s something more important than you."

The Georgetown University alum — who struggled with addiction and has been sober since the early 2000s — also confessed it took him a while to really understand what it meant to be a parent, as at first, he couldn't relate to people when they said they "would die in a second for my kid."

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"I'm aways like, if I’m being honest, ‘Eh, I don’t know.’ The first, like, eight months I’m like, ‘I don’t even know if I really love the kid.’ It’s dope, it’s cool, I’m watching this thing morph, and then all of a sudden..." said Cooper. "My experience was totally that. Fascinated by it, love taking care of it. Would I die if someone came in with a gun? It’s only a couple of months! … She could be an a------! … And then all of a sudden, it’s like no question."

The movie star noted that being a dad helped him become his best self, as he wants "to do the least amount of damage that I could do to my daughter."

The Alias alum marveled at how quickly his daughter is growing up, admitting he's shocked by her "ability to articulate her feelings at 6 years old."

"Her mother and I are bowled over at this human being that we’re raising that is able to articulate, and by the way, in her voice," he shared. "I don’t even think I found what my speaking voice was really like until a couple years ago."

Shayk and Cooper were together from 2015 to 2019. The dad-of-one has been romantically linked to Gigi Hadid since fall 2023.