Sandy-haired and politely scruffy actor Bradley Cooper played hapless reporter Will Tippin in the Jennifer Garner series Alias. Cooper, a graduate of Georgetown University (1997), began his stage and screen career in the late 1990s, while a student with the Actors Studio Drama School in New York. He appeared in Sex and the City (with Sarah Jessica Parker) and the Discovery Channel's Treks in a Wild World before landing the best-buddy role in Alias, a part he played for the first two seasons (2001-03). That led to more TV appearances, including starring in the short-lived series Kitchen Confidential (2005, with Jaime King), and then Cooper made the leap to feature films, with a specialty in comedy: The Wedding Crashers (2005, starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn); Failure to Launch (2006, with Zooey Deschanel); The Rocker (2008); He's Just Not That Into You (2009, with Scarlett Johansson); and All About Steve (2009, opposite Sandra Bullock). In 2009 he played Phil, the hip schoolteacher and one of the four buddies in the hit comedy The Hangover and starred opposite Jennifer Lawrence in the Oscar-nominated movie Silver Linings Playbook (2012).

In 2006 he co-starred in the play Three Days of Rain, the Broadway debut of Julia Roberts... As his star rose in Hollywood in 2008 and 2009, Cooper became a hit with the tabloids, too, with rumors of romantic ties to Jennifer Aniston and Renee Zellweger.