“Ultimately you want to tell a story so that it can help heal and make people feel that they’re not alone,” says Cooper, who has been nominated for an Oscar three times. “That’s what movies did for me when I was a kid. So the fact that American Sniper has done this for vets in some way, if it has at all, is incredible for me personally.”
Read Oliver Platt on Bradley Cooper for the 2015 TIME 100.