Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan will never forget first meeting each other.
Their all-too-memorable encounter occurred after Cooper, who starred alongside Mulligan in 2023′s “Maestro,” attended her one-woman performance of Dennis Kelly’s “Girls & Boys” in 2018 — and she injured herself on the stage.
“I went to meet her backstage and she was prone … because one of the sets had hit her in the top of the head halfway through the play,” Cooper recalled on Friday’s episode of “The Graham Norton Show.”
“I went back and I was like, ‘Are you OK?’” he said.
“And she was not OK, at all,” he continued. “And so we went to the emergency room.”
Mulligan told host Graham Norton that the crowd didn’t even notice the accident, as it happened during a planned “blackout” of stage lighting. She nonetheless “carried on,” only to find herself in tears after she finished.
“I just couldn’t stop crying, and I thought I was really a goner,” she told Norton. “You know, you get it in your head with a head injury, like, ‘Well that’s it.’ And then I was sobbing on the floor and … someone came in and said, ’Sorry, so sorry — Bradley Cooper [is here].”
She added: “So he came in and looked me in the eye, and was like, ‘You’re not all right.’ And we went to the emergency room.”
The duo was already famous at the time, with Cooper having directed 2018′s “A Star Is Born” and Mulligan having an Oscar nomination under her belt. This made their joint appearance at the hospital all the more bizarre.
“The nurse was delighted,” Mulligan told Norton.
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This isn’t the only time that Cooper has come to the aid of a cherished actor. Brooke Shields recently revealed that he helped her through a “surreal” seizure incident in New York City last year.
Cooper was also present when a pregnant Mulligan required medical attention on the set of “Maestro.” She was portraying Felicia Montealegre, the wife of composer Leonard Bernstein, but hilariously forgot that she looked far beyond her years when the doctor arrived.
“I was quite ill on set, and a doctor was called to give me antibiotics,” she told Norton.
“When I told him I was 12 weeks pregnant, he was not at all convinced,” Mulligan added, noting that she was “still made up to look 57 years old.”
“I couldn’t wait to tell the makeup artists how good they were,” she joked.
Both Mulligan and Cooper received Oscar nominations Tuesday for “Maestro,” with Mulligan earning a Best Actress nod and Cooper, who directed the film, landing nominations for Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor and Best Picture. The awards ceremony is set to air March 10 on ABC.
