Head-Butting Concrete Got Bradley Cooper To Sober Up For Good

It's the classic cliché that it takes rock-bottom to sober some men up for good.

"Limitless" and "The Hangover" star Bradley Cooper told The Hollywood Reporter recently that a willful concrete header convinced him he was far from the former and had weathered one too many of the latter.

Now 37-years-old and three years removed from his star-making comedic turn in "The Hangover" alongside Zach Galifianakis and Ed Helms, Cooper told THR he's actually been sober since the age of 29. Secure as he is on the wagon, he talked about the one hospitalizing moment about eight years ago that got him to get up there in the first place and fasten his seatbelt.

"I was at a party and deliberately bashed my head on the concrete floor - like, 'Hey, look how tough I am!' And I came up, and blood dripped down," Cooper said. "And then I did it again. I spent the night at St. Vincent's Hospital with a sock of ice, waiting for themt o stitch me up." It was all part of a complex Cooper admits he had that insisted he always had something to prove to somebody.

Often "living in [his] head," Cooper believed he was a failure before his career had even begun.

"I realized I wasn't going to live up to my potential, and that scared the hell out of me," he said. "I thought, 'Wow, I'm actually gonna ruin my life; I'm really gonna ruin it.

"Part of me believed it, and part of me didn't," he added.

Ultimately, he said, there was a point where he looked around and saw what drugs and alcohol could take away - not what he'd already "lost" in his own mind.

"I remember looking at my life, my apartment, my dogs [when I was still using], and I though, 'What's happening?'" he recalled.

What a lucky thing that Cooper saw the light when he did. Following a successful 2012 Sundance Film Festival premiere, his latest effort "The Words" - the tale of a writer faced with the blowback of plagiarism - co-starring Zoe Saldana hits theaters nationwide tomorrow, Sept. 7.