Variety is a weekly American entertainment trade magazine owned by Penske Media Corporation. It was founded by Sime Silverman in New York in 1905 as a weekly; in 1933 it added Daily Variety, based in Los Angeles, to cover themotion-picture industry; in 1998 it brought out Daily Variety Gotham, based in New York. Variety.com is a free website that features breaking entertainment news, reviews, box office results, cover stories, videos, photo galleries and more, plus a credits database, production charts and calendar, with archive content dating back to 1905. The last daily printed edition was put out on March 19, 2013. Variety magazine originally reported on theater and vaudeville.
February 8, 2016
Diane Warren and Lady Gaga received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song for “Til It Happens to You”.
June 2016
- Main article: Variety Studio: Actors on Actors
Lady Gaga of “American Horror Story: Hotel” and Jamie Lee Curtis of “Scream Queens” are arguably some of the most famous new faces on TV. But fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be — at least not for Curtis, who told Gaga during their conversation for the fourth season of Variety and PBS’ “Actors on Actors” series, that it’s “isolating”. Surprisingly, Gaga agreed with the veteran actress.
“I don’t think I could think of a single thing that’s more isolating than being famous”, said Gaga.
But as Curtis pointed out, they both sought out fame. Well, actually, they both sought out the “art”, and fame was a side effect.
“It’s almost impossible for people even to probably look at my career and the things I’ve done and think, ‘Oh, she didn’t want [that] — of course she wanted to be famous, of course she wanted all that attention’. It’s just, creative expression is what I am and I would’ve been doing this whether I became famous or not”, said Gaga.
“I wouldn’t have given up to try to get famous in another way”, she added. “I wanted to get a job being creative and I did”.
The hardest part of fame for Gaga has been the disconnect between herself and the people she interacts with who hold unrealistic, if not false, expectations. She assured Curtis that she’s not extraordinary.
“It is very hard to not be able to engage with people in a real and honest way because they either want something from me or they see me as something that I simply am not”, she said. “I am not some goddess that dropped down from the sky to sing pop music, I am not some extra-incredible human person that needs to be told how wonderful they are all day and kissed”.
Gaga said she would love nothing more than to have normal exchanges with people instead of being adored and showered with selfies. Curtis echoed Gaga’s sentiments about self-portrait photos, which have effectively supplanted autographs.
“There’s some idea that that is some evidence that they have met you and taken a moment with you, taken digitally a moment”, said Curtis, who’s skeptical about being able to change the new fame culture surrounding artists.
But Gaga bet Curtis that they’ll soon be able to inspire the public to see that famous artists “are real people”.
Challenge accepted, Curtis said.
"If I’m playing a character at the same time as that, I also am that as well. It’s a quite difficult thing for me to answer because I’m entirely Stefani and I’m entirely Gaga, but I also was entirely the Countess”.
“Every day I would watch Robert Durst in ‘The Jinx’ and his wife Debrah Durst and I would sort of study the practical nature in which he was devious and evil,” she said. “He just has this extremely practical way of explaining how he’s going conceal the fact that he’s dumped a body in a river and kept it in his house and cut up his best friend”.
Durst informed the character of The Countess.
“If I was going to take a guy home and f— him and then eat him, I wouldn’t know exactly how to do that”, she added.
“Which order?” joked Curtis.
“Well I know which order I might have to do it in. Well, for The Countess though that order is debatable, right? Because she’s into that sort of necro-romance as well. But during that time, you know, I became a lot more wild and crazy and matter-of-fact about things. Who I am as an artist and person changed”, said Gaga.
But Gaga isn’t like The Countess, she reassured Curtis. However, that doesn’t mean that “Lady Gaga” isn’t, in part, a character. In fact, her audience and fans have played a role in that construction.
“What I am as Gaga really is, at this moment, what other people think Gaga is. It’s not necessarily what I am entirely”, she said. “Even if I feel like Gaga, meaning this stronger individual person of myself that I discovered being young in New York, loving music, meeting with young artists, working with musicians, with writers, studying this scene and being involved in the lifestyle”.
She started calling herself Gaga after others called her that. It was a nickname that she created for herself “at her best”.
“It is a bit of a creation, but I think actually, at this point now, it’s other people that have created, through what I have made, their perception of what Gaga is as a separate entity from me”, she said.
“What I am at any given moment is some sort of amalgamation of myself Stefani, the young Italian-American girl from New York that’s an actress and a songwriter and a rebel. Another part of me is what I’m creatively interested in at the time with music and how that culture and lifestyle and the art that arose out of that is influencing me as I’m sort of reading it and writing music”, said Gaga.
“If I’m playing a character at the same time as that, I also am that as well. So, I live a lifestyle of sort of endless, relentless love for making my work. And that in every way informs me as a person, all the time”, she added.
Lady Gaga has taken inspiration from many, but a certain role of Jamie Lee Curtis’ had a “major impact” on the singer and actress.
At Variety and PBS’ “Actors on Actors”, Lady Gaga said she was inspired by Curtis’ part in “True Lies”. Curtis gave her a bit of behind-the-scenes info: while “True Lies” director James Cameron has many talents, there’s a couple of things he can’t do.
“I will tell you this: Jim Cameron is a very talented man”, Curtis said. “He can do every job on a movie better than any crew person ever could do. There’s one thing that he cannot do, and that’s act and dance”.
Lady Gaga went on to describe the impact “True Lies” had on her, and said people often joke and ask her about her “American Horror Story: Hotel” sex scenes.
“I said, ‘You Know what? You try to do that. You try to have sex with someone you don’t know that well, or fake sex, in front of 30 people holding lights in a throng, covered in diamonds and a wig”, she said.
- Editorial by Maria Cavassuto, photography by Bryce Duffy.
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November, 2018
Lady Gaga can’t shake her character from “A Star Is Born.” And she doesn’t want to. “I feel Ally inside of me,” Gaga says of the rising musical icon she plays in the film. “I wonder how long she’ll stay. Or if she’ll be in there forever.”
This symbiotic relationship is evident at her Variety photo shoot at her home in Malibu, a week before she had to evacuate due to the Woolsey Fire. Gaga isn’t sure what she’ll wear at first. Inspiration strikes after she slips on a taupe men’s collared shirt. It is the same shirt, she reveals, worn in several key scenes by her co-star Bradley Cooper as the singing heartthrob Jackson Maine in “A Star Is Born.” Later in the film, Ally inherits the garment. Like her character, Gaga keeps the memento in her closet, but she never dreamed of putting it on again — until now.
Over the next hour, Gaga poses with the shirt’s sleeves rolled up, its untucked edges falling just above her knees, revealing a tattoo of a unicorn on her left thigh. At one point, she balances on a wobbly stool in black suede knee-high boots with stiletto heels, performing a series of jaw-dropping acrobatic maneuvers. She even re-creates a moment from the film where her character traces the shape of her too-big nose. At the end of the shoot, Gaga makes a surprising confession. As she looks at the shots on a computer screen, she can’t recall the last time she saw a photograph of herself and didn’t see sadness in her eyes. These pictures are different. “And that makes me happy,” she says, tearing up.
Gaga, 32, is still processing the overwhelming success of her first movie. Seated on the deck of her sprawling estate in Malibu, with an adjoining barn for her horses and guard dogs, she speaks candidly about this period in her life. “This has been a very transformative time for me,” says Gaga about “A Star Is Born,” a life-changing journey punctuated by bursts of excitement and doubt. “As an artist, there’s always a feeling of ‘Am I good enough? Am I making something honest? Am I making something true?’ There is a sort of stagnant sadness in me, wondering if I’m enough. Today I did not see that. I saw something different. I saw a clarity. I saw a truth.”
Her vulnerable portrait of a fledgling musician has made “A Star Is Born” the movie event of the fall, catapulting Gaga into a new sphere. Musical legends like Cher and Bette Midler used to effortlessly carry their own cinematic vehicles in the ’80s and ’90s, but few professional singers have recently accomplished the trick. (Just ask Mariah Carey about the bomb that was “Glitter.”) Since early October, “A Star Is Born” has grossed more than $300 million at the global box office. Even better, the Warner Bros. release is the rare movie that transcends the big screen. There have been endless Twitter arguments about Ally’s musical evolution, Instagram love letters, memes about Gaga’s unwavering adoration of Cooper and public recitations from the soundtrack, especially of “Shallow,” the catchiest movie anthem since Céline Dion warbled about Kate and Leo’s lost love aboard the Titanic.
Now Gaga and the film are poised to storm the awards circuit as this year’s Oscars front-runner. “The business is changing so much,” says Cooper, who made his directorial debut with “Star” and spent four years producing the film on a modest $38 million budget. “I know it feels good for the industry that a movie like this, which is about relationships and how we need each other, is doing well financially.” It could finally mean some good news for the Academy Awards, which has been fighting charges of irrelevance as viewership dipped 20% in March, to a new low of 26 million. If “A Star Is Born” clinches the top prize, it will be the most successful best picture winner, in terms of domestic ticket sales, since “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” 15 years ago. (Back then, the show attracted 44 million viewers.)
And if “Shallow” is nominated for an Oscar for best song, Gaga says she’ll perform it at the ceremony. “One hundred percent,” she says. In fact, Cooper reveals that he has plans to sing the duet live with Gaga. “We talked about that actually, because I’m such a maniac,” Cooper says. “I started texting her the whole pitch of how we should do it. So we’ll see. There might be a cool, unorthodox way we could perform it.”
Gaga perhaps is perfectly suited to the rigors of modern-day Oscars campaigning, which favors bigger personalities over less-is-more. She’s been a devoted viewer for most of her life. “I used to wrap myself in an Afghan or my grandmother’s knitted blanket and stand on a podium while I watched the Oscars,” says Gaga, who grew up in Manhattan as Stefani Germanotta. “I had big dreams as a child.” Of course, she had no idea that her first movie — a remake of the 1937 film starring Janet Gaynor, with updates by Judy Garland (in 1954) and Barbra Streisand (in 1976) — would become such a phenomenon. “Well, give me a few more movies before you call me a success,” she says in her throaty voice. Even at her photo session, Gaga instructs the photographer, “Don’t shoot me as a movie star.”
Yes, there have been other film offers. But she hasn’t been reading too many scripts. The last few weeks of her life have reminded her of the time after the release of 2009’s “The Fame Monster,” the album that cemented her status as an artist who could sell out stadiums around the world. “This feels for me very much like that, but in a different way, because I have all the wisdom slash pain and betrayal of the last 10 years,” Gaga says. “Look, from the outside in, I think people think it’s all champagne and roses for us. ‘Us’ meaning the collective artists slash celebrities.” She pauses for a split second. “I don’t like the word ‘celebrity,’ because to me it negates my artistry. There’s a lot of pain you go through. Everything changes. Your whole life changes.”
“A Star Is Born” is a meditation on that fame — Gaga relates to a scene at the beginning of the film when Jackson leaves the thundering applause of a stadium to enter the quiet loneliness of his chauffeured car. She estimates that she’s watched the movie, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August, five to 10 times. On the first viewing, Cooper brought a stereo system to a private room, to amplify the sound, and he covered up the windows with garbage bags so “the light from the screen would be crisper,” she recalls. “I cried the whole time, because I missed Jackson.”
More recently, she bought a ticket to watch the movie at a local multiplex. “Yeah, I snuck in,” she says. “I sat through most of it.” She left early, but not out of fear of being spotted. “I had to remove myself before the end,” she explains. “The film moves me so deeply. I feel so entrenched in the character that the second half of the film — without revealing what happens — is so emotional and tragic. I have to take myself out of it.”
For most of her career, Gaga has been a larger-than-life presence, hiding behind masks and motifs tied to her album releases. Like Madonna, her most natural predecessor, she embraces and abandons personas with each new song, from “Bad Romance” (and that meat dress) to “Million Reasons” (with a pink pantsuit and cowgirl hat). But who is Gaga? “A Star Is Born” presents a more intimate look at the artist stripped of her armor.
Like the Garland version of the film, this latest “Star Is Born” succeeds because of the marriage between the ingénue and the icon. Gaga isn’t shy about reminding you that she isn’t Ally, although they may resemble each other. She worked hard to create the character, co-writing the songs and providing anecdotes about the music business that informed the script. Prior to the 42-day shoot, she trained with the late acting coach Elizabeth Kemp in a workshop in Santa Barbara. She submitted to an exercise where she had to lie on the floor and imagine when “life blasted you so hard you can’t remember who you were before it happened,” she recalls. “I just broke down in tears and started to cry. Before I knew it, I was talking about feeling like I was my bed and my bed was telling me to get out.”
In the script, Cooper added touchstones that nodded at the previous iterations of the story. The drag bar where Jackson meets Ally is called the Bleu Bleu, a callback to a club in Garland’s version. There was also another, more overt homage that ended up on the cutting room floor. “We did one scene where Jackson gave Ally a pair of ruby slippers,” Gaga says. “He was laying underneath the bed, and she’s on top, and all you heard him doing was clicking the heels together. And she leans over, and he’s laughing, and they are so in love.”
Toby Emmerich, the chairman of Warner Bros. Pictures Group, reveals that the original script had a different finale. “The first ending that I read, [Jackson] actually swims out into the ocean, where he commits suicide,” Emmerich says. “The script that we had when he started shooting, he rides his motorcycle. It was more like the Kris Kristofferson ending [in the 1976 version] with the Ferrari, but with Jackson with the Harley. But Bradley changed his mind and came to see me and pitched the idea of what he ended up shooting. I think he was right. When I watch the movie now, I can’t imagine it ending any other way.”
Gaga swiped several souvenirs from the set. She’s the owner of Ally’s songbook and a bottle of Mr. Bubble from a bathtub love scene, in addition to Jackson’s shirt. “I just wanted to have a piece of him with me,” says Gaga, who is engaged to talent agent Christian Carino. “This is very precious to me. These are heirlooms, or they will be heirlooms one day. They are things I will want to show my little girl or little boy and say, ‘Here they are. You can touch them.’ I want them to have a close, tangible, poetic experience with the film the way I have.”
On the night before “A Star Is Born” opened in theaters, Gaga was on the edge of her seat. Appearing alongside the other cast members, she answered questions at an Academy screening at MoMA. She spoke lovingly about working with Cooper, which she does whenever she’s asked about him. As the event ended, a throng of noisy fans gathered at the entrance, creating an unruly scene. “This is like for Princess Diana,” one Oscar voter gasped. Although bodyguards had instructed the fans that Gaga wouldn’t be signing autographs, she did anyway. As her car cruised down 53rd Street, taking a right on 6th Avenue, groupies started chasing her vehicle on foot. She rolled down the window at a traffic stop to sign more memorabilia from the back seat.
The idea of remaking “A Star Is Born” had been kicked around at Warner Bros. since the ’90s. “Anytime a big pop star broke, we would talk about it,” says producer Bill Gerber. “Hey, should we do ‘A Star Is Born’ with Lauryn Hill or Aaliyah? Whitney Houston had been talked about way back when.”
In 2011, it looked like there would be some movement. Clint Eastwood was briefly attached to direct, with Beyoncé in talks to star with Cooper. The deal didn’t come together, but in 2014, Cooper started eyeing the project as his directorial debut. “I love acting,” he says. “I think it’s the best way to direct for sure.” Still, Cooper initially considered someone else to play Jackson. “I saw this other person that I wanted to do this, who is an actual musician,” Cooper says. “But [the studio] wouldn’t make the movie with him.” A source with knowledge of the talks says that Cooper had met with Jack White, the former lead singer of the White Stripes. But this was all before Gaga came on board.
Gaga and Cooper’s chemistry is so natural, it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing these parts. Their closeness is on display during a joint interview with Variety in October in New York. Both swear that they haven’t read any of the film’s mostly glowing reviews. “My manager will sometimes text me little one-liners here and there,” Gaga says. “I’ll be like, ‘Stop it!’” Cooper has only broken the rule once. “I read one review, and it was horrible,” he says. “It was from a place I grew up reading my whole life. And I just saw it on a news feed.”
They’d like to work together again. “Maybe she’ll direct,” Cooper says. “No, no, no,” Gaga replies. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves or confuse our mediums. I did this because I believed in him and all the people he brought together. I’ll stick to directing music videos.”
One question that persists about the movie involves Ally’s career trajectory. In the middle of the film, at the hands of a smarmy British manager, she dyes her hair orange and starts producing more commercial pop. On “Saturday Night Live,” Ally belts out a sexually provocative tune, “Why Did You Do That?,” which leads Jackson to believe she’s lost her way. Diane Warren, who co-wrote the lyrics, has said it wasn’t intended to be a bad song. But Gaga has avoided providing her own interpretation until now. “When we see her on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and she’s singing a song about why do you look so good in those jeans, it’s almost the antithesis of where we started,” Gaga says. “That is relatively shallow.” Cooper doesn’t see it that way. “I don’t necessarily view her music as superficial,” he says. “I think she’s performing with all her heart.”
There’s no denying the universal appeal of “Shallow.” A few weeks later, at her house, Gaga explains her theory on why it’s become such a hit. “We are living in a time where there’s so much conversation about women’s voices being heard,” Gaga says. “Men listening to those voices.
And also, men not listening to those voices. Women being silenced in very public ways, like Dr. [Christine Blasey] Ford with Justice [Brett] Kavanaugh. Judge Kavanaugh being appointed is basically like telling every single woman in the country that’s been assaulted, ‘We don’t care. Or we don’t believe you.’”
She says what’s special about the song is that it’s an open dialogue between a man and a woman: “To me, that conversation is what makes the song successful and beautiful and why people cry when they hear it. It’s because that man and woman connect, and they are listening to each other.”
As Gaga reflects on the cultural impact of “A Star Is Born,” she looks at the film through the eyes of her fans. It means a lot to her that they’ve championed this project. “I only want to win now,” she says, speaking metaphorically, “because I want that kid who feels like me, that misfit or outcast that didn’t belong, to win. The reward for me is that this movie is a win for them.”
- Editorial by Ramin Setoodeh, photography by Art Streiber.
January, 2022
- Main article: Variety Studio: Actors on Actors
Lady Gaga (“House of Gucci”) and Jake Gyllenhaal (“The Guilty”) sat down for a virtual chat for Variety Studio: Actors on Actors, presented by Amazon Studios.
Lady Gaga hasn’t added “movie critic” to her résumé yet — but she can’t help raving about Jake Gyllenhaal’s latest film, “The Guilty.” When she sees Gyllenhaal at our photo shoot for Actors on Actors, her praise is as effusive and passionate as fans who’ve watched her recent red-carpet run-ins might expect. “It was phenomenal,” Gaga says about Gyllenhaal’s 2021 Netflix film. “My heart was pounding out of my chest.”
Gyllenhaal plays a 911 dispatcher in the Antoine Fuqua-directed thriller — shot in only 11 days. The short time frame may have helped generate intensity, but left some doubt in its star’s mind: Gyllenhaal confides in Gaga that he wished he could have gone back and redone parts of his performance. Gaga had her own recent experience of working with a decisive director: Ridley Scott, of “House of Gucci,” also moves quickly behind the camera. In the film, Gaga plays Patrizia Reggiani, an ambitious Italian woman who marries an heir to the Gucci throne, Maurizio (Adam Driver) — and then arranges for his murder after he files for divorce.
Although Gaga and Gyllenhaal don’t know each other, their chemistry pops from the moment they meet at our shoot. (Take note, future casting directors.) And their posing calls to mind two grown-ups suddenly on a prom date. “I’ve never held anyone like this,” Gyllenhaal says as he wraps his arm awkwardly around Gaga’s waist, as a small group of handlers coo their approval. “Mommy and Daddy love each other,” Gaga says. “Good job, honey.” They are so at ease, Gaga even cracks a joke about “Bubble Boy,” the 2001 teen comedy that Gyllenhaal made at the start of his career.
“The two of us are a nightmare,” Gaga says with a laugh. Which is to say that they give us all the outsize drama — and insights — that fans crave. Over the next hour, they share their deepest acting secrets, methods, inspirations. And they discuss why “Donnie Darko” is like a religion for Gaga.
JAKE GYLLENHAAL: One of the things that I loved about “House of Gucci” was that the film has such an operatic style and it has so many characters surrounding your character. And opera is one of my favorite forms of expression to watch, but to see a performance that stays true to reality was incredible.
LADY GAGA: Thank you very much. That means a lot coming from you. The first thing I thought when I read the script was “OK. They want some woman to use her body and her manipulation to get money from this incredibly wealthy man.” And the more that I dug through it, I realized that she was really in love with him. And women are complex creatures, and we’re complicated, and it’s never one single story. It’s many stories.
I wanted to inject a reality into her that was multifaceted and fractured and broken. When I think about her as a character, I think of me taking little bits of glass from tons of different women and encapsulating them into one character that I still believe to be truly her, but I think insanity is subjective.
GYLLENHAAL: You’re making me think of the moment where she asks him his name and he tells her at the bar. And the register could have been done so many different ways. That kind of sets off the whole movie, right?
GAGA: I talked about that and studied that moment for a really long time, and Adam and I spoke in-depth about it. When does he fall in love with her in this scene? And we had this deep dive. I won’t tell you, because I don’t want the audience to know. But there’s a reason I am the way that I am in the scene. I do really study the hell out of a script, like a romance. And I break it down into what I believe it to be.
GYLLENHAAL: I am amazed at how you are and have established yourself in music and songwriting in this extraordinary, mind-boggling way. And then you’ve somehow seamlessly been able to come into the world of storytelling in another form. And for me, when I think about acting in movies, I think of it as fits and starts. It’s not a song. You get little moments you have to pull off. I’m so interested in your point of view, going into those little moments. Is that a thrill?
GAGA: I wanted to be an actress before I wanted to be a singer. And I studied for a really long time. I went to Lee Strasberg. I went to Circle in the Square [Theatre School]. I studied the Stanislavski method. I worked with Susan Batson, who’s my acting teacher now. I would actually say playing a character for me is like living one long song.
GYLLENHAAL: Is that why you stayed in character all day?
GAGA: Yeah. One long song that lasts for months. For “A Star Is Born,” it was years for me. And for Patrizia, I dropped her faster because she was a killer and there were some things about the transformation for me psychologically that were super challenging. When I watch the movie, it looks like I’m watching a montage of my life. I don’t feel like I’m watching a film.
GYLLENHAAL: A really wonderful actor once told me that if you watch yourself in a film, you should do it twice.
GAGA: Yeah. The second time was better for me. Since I was a little girl, I was so mercilessly bullied, and I had a really strict upbringing. So acting for me was a way to totally escape who I was. And I think I’ve done it my whole career with taking on the artistic persona of whatever music I’m writing and living inside my art. And for films, it’s different, but it’s not.
I studied animals to play her. I studied a house cat for the beginning of the film. And then at the funeral, when she sees Al Pacino’s character, she suddenly turns into a fox because she’s hunting now. And I watched foxes hunt and they’re really funny, because they hunt mice in the snow and they leap up and they burrow. I actually did exercises in my hotel room where I would be the animal. And then for that last scene, it was the panther. It was because the panther moves slowly, but then when it kills its prey, it is really violent and it’s really ugly, and then after, it cries.
I chose these animals as a way to map the physicality of the character. What I feel in that moment is what she was feeling. The cameras float away. I’m not an actor that really knows where the camera is. But I guess what I’m trying to say is it’s super immersive, as if I’m in the middle of singing a song and the song doesn’t end until I decide it does.
GYLLENHAAL: It’s interesting, the scene with the character Paolo [Jared Leto], where you’re sort of manipulating him.
GAGA: I love how you said “sort of.” She’s like really gaslighting the fuck out of him. She’s gaslighting herself too. That’s what makes it a survival story instead of a story about scandal and greed. She really thinks she’s doing the right thing, and it’s why this murder took place. I believe this with all my heart, because why any Italian woman would insert herself into a totally male-dominated business is beyond me. And I mean that with love.
I couldn’t not love her. I almost find it interesting now that I haven’t heard from her, because she’s alive. I don’t know if she’s seen it. I don’t know what she thinks about it, but everyone around me said: “I think this might be painful.”
GYLLENHAAL: I was thinking about when you’re performing for hundreds of thousands of people. When you’re in a scene, if it’s two people, how available is your heart? Do you get stage fright?
GAGA: I’m going to do some acting now, and I’m going to do some sense memory. My sense memory tells me that when I’m onstage — like when I was in Mexico City, and I could hear the crowd screaming, and there was 150,000 people, and I was 23 — I just remember thinking to myself, “I could feel everybody’s heart and I wish I could share mine. I wish for you to know the pain in my heart, so that I could hold space for the pain in yours.” I’m kind of that chick, you know? When I’m acting, though, the difference is I’m locked in with the actors.
GYLLENHAAL: As a fellow actor, I feel your generosity in watching a scene. I think the thing I’ve always loved about acting is being able to connect with someone.
GAGA: I ask for consent a lot, actually. I’ll be like, “Is it OK if I touch you?” When I’m in character, I don’t pretend we’re not filming. I get people who are like, “Why did you keep your accent the whole time?” Can you imagine going in and out of that shit all the time, and I would only get three takes? I had to be ready.
The way that I feel safe is just that I feel safe being in pain. I feel safe in art. I almost think I feel safer with art than I do in life. When I did the bathtub scene, when I went under, they had to yell “Cut” because they were like, “Get her out of there!” I was fine. I can hold my breath for a long time. I’m a singer. I feel protected by art. I feel art has saved me my whole life. What makes you feel safe when you’re working?
GYLLENHAAL: I’ve chosen a lot of characters through many years to search through things, ideas, feelings. I think expression is life-saving. It breaks my heart that it’s not available to everyone. Ang Lee once said that we pretend in telling stories to get closer to the truth. It’s something that stuck with me and I think about often. I think that’s why we all love watching movies.
GAGA: I want to say about your film, “The Guilty,” the movie was extremely powerful. I feel like I’ve injected a lot of trauma into my work my whole life. I was really moved by your ability to go to the bottom throughout the whole film. I was really struck by a true belief that he was in a tremendous amount of pain and he was so sad.
GYLLENHAAL: I think an interesting part of that film is there is like an entertaining aspect where we’re trying to figure out what’s going on. But I think it really does speak to mental health.
GAGA: I saw it behind your eyes the whole time. There’s a very specific thing that I think the eyes do, and I think when we are feeling traumatized, they kind of sink back just a little and they get glassy.
GYLLENHAAL: We shot the movie in 11 days.
GAGA: Wow.
GYLLENHAAL: In the process, Antoine Fuqua, who directed the film, decided 20 pages a day of the script. And he was like, we’re not turning back. You get your shots, and then we go on to the next.
GAGA: So he was fast? Ridley is fast too.
GYLLENHAAL: And I remember at day three or four going, I want to go back, to paint maybe a different angle or a different edge on something. And I couldn’t. I think I would have liked to push it maybe even farther into a bit of fooling the audience at the beginning.
GAGA: Yeah but, I loved it. Was it hard or intimidating or exciting to play a law enforcement person in 2021?
GYLLENHAAL: It was actually 2020. The story is clearly a fantasy. It’s an expression of something I don’t think I’ve ever seen. There’s a hope for redemption, and that so many people, particularly in law enforcement, there’s no outlet for help.
GAGA: I remember I noticed that he had a glass of water next to him that he had not drank. I was like, “He’s not even hydrating.”
GYLLENHAAL: I love doing the performance with the reading where you don’t know everything. All these instincts come up. You have to use what you got.
GAGA: Yeah. Well for TV, also — like when I did “American Horror Story.”
GYLLENHAAL: Oh, yeah?
GAGA: I basically got the script 30 minutes before. I had some idea of what we were going to do, but then you’d be doing one scene from Episode 3, and then they’d go: “Actually, so the next scene’s going to be from Episode 7.”
GYLLENHAAL: Did you enjoy that?
GAGA: I loved playing the Countess, but I think I loved playing her because her ultimate trauma was that she was essentially guaranteed to almost live forever and live forever young. And I made the choice very early on. I said to myself, “Violence relaxes me.”
GYLLENHAAL: Wow.
GAGA: Because she was always in crisis. She was abducting a child or abducting people to bring home with my co-star, Matt Bomer, and we would take them home and kill them and drink their blood. That felt more like pretend to me. I lived like her. I mean, I didn’t do what she did, but I dressed like her all the time. I listened to the same music that put me in her head space. And on set, they gave you fake cocaine and fake booze, but while you’re doing it, you’re like, “Is this real?! I don’t know.” You put yourself in that place.
I look up to you a lot because we were talking today, off camera and on, and just hearing the way you talk about your tools with you now that you can navigate your imagination, I really long for that.
GYLLENHAAL: You need those boundaries and safety. What movies inspired you when you were growing up?
GAGA: Everything from “The Wizard of Oz” to “Goodfellas.”
GYLLENHAAL: Same movie, basically.
GAGA: “Goodfellas” was a very important part of my life growing up. And Scorsese is the best ever. Also, “Donnie Darko.” I don’t want to lie and tell you I haven’t seen it so many times.
GYLLENHAAL: Really? OK. That just made my day.
GAGA: In the world of music, but in fashion as well, “Donnie Darko,” it’s religion. It really is. And if you know your shit, you know Donnie Darko.
GYLLENHAAL: I have never met Donnie Darko, but “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” that was a movie that hit me really hard.
GAGA: “Umbrellas of Cherbourg.”
GYLLENHAAL: Oh, my God. Yes.
GAGA: But also “Bambi.”
GYLLENHAAL: Absolutely “Bambi.” “Dumbo.”
GAGA: Cartoons. They have so much heart.
GYLLENHAAL: And so much pain too. That’s beautiful.
- Editorial by Ramin Setoodeh, photography by Cliff Watts.
Just for Variety (with Marc Malkin)
In early February, 2021, Variety has launched the “Just for Variety” podcast, a companion to the weekly magazine column of the same name. Each week “Just for Variety” columnist and Hollywood’s most recognizable red carpet correspondent Marc Malkin sits down with today’s biggest stars to talk film, television, pop culture and the latest news.
December, 2021
- Lady Gaga wears a midi dress by Emilia Wickstead, a necklace, and a ring by Fernando Jorge.