John Milton Is Bradley Cooper's Bro, Bro

By Phoenix Tso | December 17, 2013 | 11:45pm

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Our favorite intellectual thespian, Bradley
Cooper likes—nay, loves— Milton’s Paradise
Lost, if his fratty gushing about it to GQ
is any indication.

For your enjoyment:

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“Milton, bro? Milton.
Fuckin’—that was the end of it. Motherfucker’s 57 or whatever, blind, dictating
it to his fucking daughter-nurse—Paradise Lost? I mean, I just couldn’t…
That poem fucking killed me. Satan? That character was un-fucking-believable. I
could taste him in my mouth, dude, reading that. I really, really, for some
reason, connected with that poem.”

I totally get you, brah, and so does my friend Evan (hi!), who
turned in a paper about Paradise Lost to
our AP English class that sounded just like this. I mean, that version was a
peer-edited rough draft that he mistakenly turned in as the real thing, and it
got a C, but then again, my friend neglected to use figurative language that’s
as good as, “I could taste him in my mouth, dude.”

Some discussion questions, based on Cooper’s beautiful thoughts about that book which, coincidentally, is the best
book ever to be dictated by a blind man to his fucking daughter-nurse:

1.
How much is the GQ writer making fun of Cooper when he writes, “But he healed, and then, in 2004, he got cast in Wedding
Crashers. ‘A fucking tyrant’ is how he describes the character now.
His very own Satan, from Paradise Lost.”

2. How
much is Amy Adams bullshitting when she says, “I’ve
just never seen [Cooper] as a frat boy. I understand how people could perceive that.
But he’s a very soulful person, a very open person. I think that people can
mistake a sort of laid-back quality for that frat thing.”

3. Would the “dudes” and “bros” get lost in translation if
Bradley Cooper were talking about Paradise
Lost in French?

4. The AV Club says that Cooper has been attached to a 3D “aerial
warfare” version of Milton’s opus since 2011. How quickly is this movie going to get made after producers read this profile?

5. Is anybody getting a little sentimental about how Cooper became sober, and started accepting himself, before he
became a big fucking movie star?

6. Who wants to see Bradley Cooper do a web series where he does
a dramatic reading of his thesis about Lolita
(imagine all the terms of endearment in that whole paper), and then starts
bawling while reviewing Romeo and Juliet?

That would be my favorite Bradley Cooper project ever.

Image via Getty.