Hop into the Wayback Machine to see a young Bradley Cooper quiz Sean Penn

Long before he was crowned the Sexiest Man Alive and earned an Oscar nomination for "Silver Linings Playbook," Bradley Cooper was just another struggling, shaggy-haired actor looking for career advice. And he made sure to seek out the biggest and best names he could. Behold this gem from a 1999 episode of "Inside the Actors Studio," in which a youthful Cooper, then a grad student attending the Actors Studio drama school at Pace University, asks class interviewee Sean Penn about his method. "Hey, Mr. Penn, I'm Bradley Cooper, a second-year actor," he offers. "My question is regarding [the 1998 indie film] 'Hurlyburly.' What was it like to revisit it a character, Eddie, after a ten-year hiatus? Did you have new discoveries? Did you find that it was a different approach, because you had already done this character before?" Bradley, who in 2011 became the first Actors Studio graduate to appear as a guest on the James Lipton-hosted show (the experience proved so emotionally overwhelming, he got teary), was also caught on camera asking questions of Robert De Niro and Steven Spielberg. Fast forward to 3:58 below to see B.Coop quiz the Hollywood legends …