Anderson Cooper’s grief podcast expands live on CNN
Anderson Cooper’s podcast All There Is, which examines grief, will be a weekly initiative with a live show.
Anderson Cooper lost his father Wyatt Cooper when he was 10 years old and his younger brother Carter when he was 21 years old. Cooper’s mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, also passed away six years ago.
But the 58-year-old CNN news anchor regularly honors their memory on his grief podcast, “All There Is,” which debuted three years ago. It’s now turning into a weekly effort throughout the year, with a weekly live show airing Thursday nights (9:15 a.m. ET on CNN). Cooper won’t just be a celebrity — future guests include Luke Bryan, Mariska Hargitay, and Charlamagne the God — but listeners and viewers of the podcast will also regularly call his answering machine to share their stories of grief.
“As I listen to these messages, I hear all the sadness that’s out there,” he said in a video call from CNN’s offices in New York.
Outside of his podcast, Cooper also remembers his past by watching movies. Some people watch it over and over again. One of them you recently re-watched: 1982’s Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford and directed by Ridley Scott.
Ford will play Rick Deckard, a former police officer who works as a Blade Runner in Los Angeles around 2019, hunting down bionic androids called replicants. Deckard is brought back into the group to “decommission” the four replicants who have gone berserk, but he falls in love with a replicant named Rachel (Sean Young) who believes her to be human.
“There’s something comforting about going back to these things,” Cooper says. “It’s a movie that I watched as a kid and I don’t even know what it is. It’s not like Blade Runner is a very emotional movie. You know, I don’t cry in Terms of Endearment. But this is an echo of my past, an echo of my brother.”
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Contributor: Brian Truitt
