Brooke Shields Recalls Bradley Cooper Helping Her Through ‘Surreal’ Seizure

Brooke Shields is opening up about suffering “a full-blown grand mal seizure” in September and how Bradley Cooper stepped in to help in a moment she didn’t think was real at first. The supermodel shared her “surreal” story in a new interview with Glamour, revealing that the incident occurred five days before the opening of her one-woman show, “Previously Owned by Brooke Shields.”

“I was preparing for the show, and I was drinking so much water, and I didn’t know I was low in sodium,” Shields said. “I was waiting for an Uber. I get down to the bottom of the steps, and I start evidently looking weird, and (the people I was with) were like, ‘Are you okay?’” Shields then left her house and was walking to the corner when her symptoms began to worsen. “I’m like, ‘Why am I out here?’ Then I walk into the restaurant L’Artusi, and I go to the sommelier who had just taken an hour to watch my run-through,” she recalled. “I go in, two women come up to me; I don’t know them. Everything starts to go black. Then my hands drop to my side and I go headfirst into the wall.”

Shields then began to have a grand mal seizure, “frothing at the mouth, totally blue, trying to swallow my tongue,” with the next thing she remembers is being loaded into an ambulance with oxygen on. Regaining consciousness, Shields wasn’t sure if she was still alive due to what she saw next: “And Bradley f-king Cooper is sitting next to me holding my hand,” she said. “I didn’t have a sense of humor,” she continued. “I couldn’t really get any words out. But I thought to myself, ‘This is what death must be like. You wake up and Bradley Cooper’s going, ‘I’m going to go to the hospital with you, Brooke,’ and he’s holding my hand. And I’m looking at my hand, I’m looking at Bradley Cooper’s hand in my hand, and I’m like, ‘This is odd and surreal.’”

Cooper got involved when the sommelier at the restaurant had tried to reach Shields’s husband, Chris Henchy, but only had been able to get ahold of his assistant. That assistant then called another assistant, who called Cooper, as he was in the area. “His assistant called Bradley and said, ‘Brooke’s on the ground. Chris isn’t around. Go get her,’” Shields revealed. “And he came, and somebody called the ambulance. And then it was like I walked in with Jesus.”

After a battery of tests in the ICU at the hospital, doctors ultimately determined Shields had low sodium levels after having “flooded [her] system” with water during the preparations for her show. “I was drinking too much water because I felt dehydrated because I was singing more than I’ve ever sung in my life and doing a show and a podcast,” she said. ‘So they were just like, ‘Eat potato chips every day.’”