Bradley Cooper Was “Terrified” After Lying To Land His Sex And The City Part

Long before becoming a household name, Bradley Cooper got his first acting role on Sex and the City. It should have been a cause for celebration, but instead, he “was terrified,” as he recalled during the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on Feb. 8. The future Oscar nominee hadn’t been truthful about his skills while auditioning, and he knew he was going to get caught in his lie.

A False Start

When Cooper went in to audition for Sex and the City, he didn’t actually expect anything to come of it. “At that time, I didn’t even realize you could get the job,” he said, per Deadline. So, he apparently felt OK saying he could drive a sports car when, in fact, he couldn’t drive a stick shift.

“I remember when I got the call to do it, I was terrified,” Cooper said. “‘What do you mean, I have to do it?’”

The truth came out when Cooper was on set to film, as Sex and the City writer and director Michael Patrick King previously shared on Max’s And Just Like That… The Writers Room podcast in June 2023. Cooper said at the film festival that “they sent [him] to Models Driving School,” also according to Deadline. “I still messed it up, so they had somebody else drive the car and I just had to… pretend that we stopped,” he added.

Working Around The Lie

It all went down at 4 a.m. on a Friday outside 14th Street in Manhattan, King recalled on the podcast. Cooper’s guest role was in Season 2, Episode 4, “They Shoot Single People, Don’t They?” and he was playing Jake, a potential hookup for Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) after a magazine photo shoot went wrong. They met when she was coping with her unfortunate “Single & Fabulous?” New York magazine cover, and she got into his Karmann Ghia. On set, King soon found that Cooper couldn’t drive them anywhere.

“I said, ‘Bradley, this is where you drive, you take off.’ And he goes, ‘I can’t drive a stick,’” King said.

Ultimately, they “pivoted” away from the original plan: Carrie crawled “out of the Karmann Ghia and walked herself home,” King added. And thus marked Cooper’s TV debut.

The Rise Of Bradley Cooper

After Sex and the City, Cooper’s acting career picked up speed faster than his driving on the show. It did, however, still take him some time to establish himself as a leading man. He gained momentum in the early 2000s with movies like Wet Hot American Summer and Wedding Crashers, plus the TV show Alias. Later, his profile shot up with 2009’s The Hangover and its sequels. From there, he began to take on more “serious” roles and he’s since gone on to rack up 12 Academy Award nominations.

Cooper has come a long way since his audition lie, and now he’ll forever be one of Sex and the City’s most famous guest stars.