Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence have appeared in multiple films together, as you may know. In a few they have been romantically involved, such as Silver Linings Playbook, while in others they are simply connected vicariously through other characters, e.g., American Hustle. While watching them in American Hustle–in which Cooper plays an FBI agent bossing around a criminal Christian Bale, whose character is married to Jennifer Lawrence’s–I saw a tear in space and time for a brief period when Cooper and Lawrence were in the same scene, in a casino.

A wall between them opened up to reveal a glowing white portal that seemed devoid of any kind of substance, a kind of gateway that connected the two actors. Suddenly, I was flooded with images of the two blended together into one body, completely connected in identical veins, organs, muscle tissue, everything. It was as if they were a hermaphroditic single embodiment of human perfection. Their bodies were one mass, and the mass smiled at me with a perfect Hollywood grin before the vision faded out in a bright light identical to the portal that had appeared on the wall. My life was instantly irreversibly altered.

I knew there had to be something to this, a theory of sorts, and so I developed a diagram detailing what I’ve decided to call The Cooper-Lawrence Paradox, which explains how both are actually a singular being that can somehow travel seamlessly through time and space to appear as two unique individuals sharing the same space and curate two flourishing acting careers. Every time you see them on screen together, I realized, you’re actually watching the same person at two different points in time split into two different variations: one more masculine, the other feminine. They are actually from two different dimensional planes, communicating on one: ours.

The theory explained so much, how the two were inextricably linked throughout Hollywood. It was one person who had managed to infiltrate the Hollywood community at two different points in time from two very different angles, only to collide in the recent years.

Let me explain where I’m going with this, starting with Bradley Cooper’s appearance as an audience member on Inside the Actors Studio when Robert De Niro was the guest.

Inside the Actor’s Studio – 1999: The Beginning of the Collision

Robert De Niro, as you may or may not recall, played Bradley Cooper’s character’s father in the award-winning film Silver Linings Playbook in 2012. Before that, De Niro played a manipulative tycoon in Limitless, wherein he wanted to use Cooper’s drug-motivated genius mind to make him a fortune.

Well, the De Niro-Cooper connection first began when De Niro appeared as a guest on Inside the Actors Studio in 1999. A young Bradley Cooper, an audience member and college student at the time, asked the veteran actor for acting advice. You can view the footage here:

Specifically, Cooper asks about his technique when performing in the film Awakenings, which came out in 1990, the same year Jennifer Lawrence was “born.”

I believe the brief conversation between De Niro and Cooper here could be the moment that Jennifer Lawrence decided she wanted to be an actress, at 9 years old. This would make De Niro the catalyst that would initiate the Cooper-Lawrence Paradox. Starting in 1975, while De Niro was likely filming Taxi Driver, Bradley Cooper was born into the timeline. De Niro’s acting bravado following his Oscar award in 1974, then in ’75, (and in ’76, when Taxi Driver was released) may have resulted in Cooper coming into our universe to start what I’m calling The Cooper Looper.

The Cooper Looper – 1975-1990

Actor Bradley Cooper is born on January 5, 1975, in the beautiful city of Philadelphia. He is most definitely male, but little do his parents know that he is capable of much more than most male infants; he has the capacity to change his physical appearance on another plane, and bring this female entity into the same shared timeline. Her name would be Jennifer Lawrence.

He would grow up with aspirations to be an actor, motivated by Robert De Niro among many others. With the arrival of De Niro’s film Awakenings in December of 1990, there was another kind of awakening on the horizon prior to the film’s release, as on August 15, 1990, actress Jennifer Lawrence was born.

My belief here is that when Bradley Cooper was 15 and considering pursuing his acting career, he envisioned a female lead who would share the limelight with him in his future career. De Niro’s career was transitioning from the ’80s to the ’90s, a new decade during which he would experience a continuously flourishing career with Scorsese films like Goodfellas in 1990 and Casino in 1995, along with a host of others.

It was De Niro’s transition combined with Cooper’s “awakening” as an actor that resulted in Jennifer Lawrence converging into a new timeline in our dimension. See, initially, I believe that Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper were born in two separate dimensions at the same time, and could occasionally intertwine in another dimension between them, which would reach into Lawrence’s other dimension and our current line with Cooper.

But it was De Niro who was able to bring both together on two separate timelines within this shared universe, creating a bizarre paradox. I call the Jennifer Lawrence timeline The Lawrence Line. The two meeting together in this dimension is something I’m calling The Convergence.

The Lawrence Line/Convergence – 1990-present

On August 15, 1990, actress Jennifer Lawrence is born in the Southern haven that is Louisville, Kentucky. There are only two states between Cooper and Lawrence’s birthplaces, preventing their direct connection, and they are Ohio and West Virginia. This doesn’t factor into anything from what I can see, though, but the state just north of both Kentucky and Pennsylvania is New York, the birthplace of none other than Robert De Niro.

The states were aligned during her birth, in a perfect Northeast-pointing line, and the remnants of both Cooper’s acting aspirations and the other version lying in the other Lawrence universe instilled the acting gene within her. She was destined from that moment to meet with her alternate male self on this same timeline, and the unconscious sense of kinship would merge the two on the Hollywood scene.

After the two rose to success in the acting world, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence would meet as acting partners for the first time in 2012 as conflicted lovers in Silver Linings Playbook. To further solidify their partnership, binding force Robert De Niro was their co-star, playing the father of Cooper’s character Pat. His presence likely held them apart as two separate bodies, while allowing them to share the same space as two separate entities, rather than combining into the perceivable Cooplaw Mass (an event I’ll call The Merging), which I believe could feasibly destroy all timelines in the Cooper-Lawrence Paradox, perhaps causing a fractal implosion that causes all of Hollywood and film to collapse in on itself.

The De Niro Factor and Continued Convergence

As the Cooper Looper and Lawrence Line continue to coexist on the same plane, Robert De Niro’s existence has helped to launch Cooper and Lawrence into a slew of other films together. The two would meet again in 2013 in the film American Hustle, in which De Niro would appear again as an organized crime boss named Victor Tellegio. It was enough to spur them along even further, as the two would meet a year later in Serena, playing lovers once again, and now Joy in 2015 with, of course, Robert De Niro once again.

I also find it interesting how Bradley Cooper has stated that he will never sleep with Jennifer Lawrence, and the real reason for that I believe is they are secretly aware of their convergence. They know that they are the same person and have come to understand how this has come to be, how they’re both sharing the same universal space. At the same time, it helps Cooper’s image by publicly stating that they will never mate.

It’s unknown at this time how long their lines will stay perfectly parallel, but I await a future merging between the two, an instance where Cooper and Lawrence will collide and fuse at the molecular-genetic level when the timelines can no longer stay separate, and thus forming a unisex ultra-intelligent entity that can freely travel from this dimension to the other Lawrence’s, to possible other timelines where the two are born at separate times on the same existential terrain.

Should this happen, I believe the Cooper Looper will reverse itself and start over in 1975, and the Lawrence born in 1990 will travel fused with 1975-Cooper to meet with 1975-Lawrence that currently exists in another universe, and the two will live as one from 1975 until, well, who knows. The problem with this is, without De Niro, how could this timeline with Cooper and Lawrence exist, and is De Niro only existing in this timeline? Perhaps he exists in the timeline of 1975-born Lawrence, but didn’t have the level of success that he has in this one. Maybe that‘s the major factor in the Cooper-Lawrence Paradox. Without the success of De Niro, Cooper and Lawrence are on two parallel timelines in separate dimensions, but in this universe both are allowed to exist because of the 1990 breakaway.

This is the diagram I have created to help illustrate the entire Cooper-Lawrence Paradox as I’ve developed it so far (click on it to see it quite enlarged):

I may update this theory upon the acquiring of new information in the future, or present, or past.