To think we almost lost Bradley Cooper to pots, pans and and a stove top. The actor admits he once wanted to be a chef.

“I just sort of thought it was cool and that chefs were cool when I was a kid and I just thought that chefs were like rock stars,” Cooper says. “So I thought maybe I’d be a chef but then I realized really early it’s too hot. The pressure is too insane. I also thought I wanted to be a ninja, you know what I mean, but then I realized that I only wanted to play them in movies.”

In Burnt (in theaters now), he plays Adam Jones, a drug addict chef who tries to make a career comeback after getting some sobriety under his belt. Directed by John Wells, the film’s cast also includes Sienna Miller, Daniel Brühl, Matthew Rhys, Omar Sy, Alicia Vikander, Uma Thurman and Emma Thompson.

“I’ve always been fascinated about food,” says Cooper, who previously played a chef in recovery a decade ago on the short lived TV series Kitchen Confidential, adding, “Growing up in an Italian household, my grandmother was an incredible cook and we just grew up with basically food being all that we talked about. You either talked about what you were going to eat, what you just ate, and what you’re going to eat tomorrow.”

Cooper says he loves cooking for his friends.

“They came over and I would just love to test out stuff,” he said. “So it’s just something that always came natural to me and then I started working as a prep cook for an Italian restaurant Mirabella’s. The head chef there was a 21-year-old guy, who had just come back from Paris…and I was just sort of in awe of him and I would always ask him to teach me stuff.”