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During his Variety Actors on Actors conversation with Glenn Close, Sam Elliott dished on the first table read of “A Star Is Born” with Lady Gaga. “I’ve loved her from afar,” Elliott said. “She was just kind of this regular girl on some level, this Stefani,” he said. “She was stunning to work with.” Elliott described a moment at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles after a long day and shooting in the hot sun. “It was all her Little Monsters, her fanbase that followed her religiously. They were the extras in the crowd,” he said, remembering how morale had begun to dwindle as the sun went down and it got chillier. “She just came out of nowhere and sat down at the piano and started singing,” he said of Gaga. “Everybody just stopped. It was just magical.” He also discussed he and Gaga’s implicit trust in Cooper’s vision for the film. “I’d never met Bradley Cooper before,” he said of being asked to meet with Cooper for the role. “I ended up going to his home and sat with him for a couple hours,” he said, recalling how Cooper brought out a tape of him working with a vocal coach to learn to talk like him. “He turned this thing on and it sounded very much like me…he’d committed to my voice before I was set for the part,” Elliott said. It was Cooper’s unwavering faith that became the life blood of the project. “I remember Bradley telling me in the driveway, ‘If you trust me, you’ll be glad you did it,'” Elliott said.

Lady Gaga knew the song “Shallow” was something special the first time she played the melody for collaborators Mark Ronson, Anthony Rossomando and Andrew Wyatt two years ago at a recording studio in Malibu. But when “Shallow” became woven into the story of Bradley Cooper’s remake of “A Star Is Born,” becoming the foundation of the film’s deeply felt love story, it turned into something else. “It’s a song that gives you wings to fly,” Gaga says. First heard in the movie during an intimate, late-night, parking lot courtship scene between Ally, the aspiring singer played by Gaga with disarming charm, and Jackson Maine, Cooper’s grizzled country-rock superstar, “Shallow” roars to full life later in the film when Jackson invites Ally on stage to sing it during a concert at the Greek Theatre. Gaga’s soaring bridge as she takes the microphone — roughly transcribed as “Haaaaaa-ahhhh-ahhh-ohhhh-ahhaaaaaa-ahhhh-ahhh-ohhhh-ah!!!” — is the moment Ally’s star is born. And when the movie’s trailer dropped in June, it was also the moment that birthed a thousand memes and stoked anticipation for the film, which has grossed nearly $200 million in its domestic run. “What the movie turned the song into is just another level,” Ronson says. “You feel pretty lucky to be along for that ride because somebody’s taken that thing that you did and hitched it to a cart on steroids.” We spoke recently to Gaga and Ronson, both of whom still seem a bit shell-shocked by the song’s popularity, particularly since the country-tinged power ballad sounds so dissimilar from most everything else on the charts right now. Gaga: When I wrote that song with Mark and Anthony and Andrew, it was different from any other experience I’ve had writing a song. There was a grave nature to the room. I was at the piano, the guys each had a guitar in their hands and we started coming up with lyrics and talking to each other. That’s really what the song is. It’s a conversation between a man and a woman. But we didn’t know that when we started. Ronson: In the original script, Jackson was going to drown at the end. So Gaga comes in, sits down at the piano and starts playing a few chords, and it just sounds big, right off the bat. And she comes up with the chorus, “I’m off the deep end, watch as I dive in.” She’s got most of the thing in her head, and I’m just trying to offer some words. “Crash through the surface, where they can’t hurt us.” It felt like an end credits song because it was about the suicide. Or maybe that’s just me. In my mind, it was the end credits song, and he’s drowned. Gaga: There was a time when he was going to drown in the end, so we thought it might be the ending song. Then as the script changed, we made it a song about the two falling in love. I do feel it was more than the literal drowning element of the original script. It was much more about wanting a deep connection and love than it was about water. Ronson: I’m no film buff or auteur, but this movie gets falling in love really well. And that parking lot scene where she sings that first verse to him … that’s two people who don’t want this night to end. For the song to be woven into that thread … seeing it for the first time, my hair just stood up. Gaga: It starts in the parking lot. Then she arrives at the concert, and Jackson has had some time to think about it, and he has added his verse. And she’s so overwhelmed by what he’s done for her and this arrangement, it gives her the courage to go out there and sing in front of his audience. It’s a song that essentially inspires both of them to be fearless in different ways. For him, fearless in love; for her, fearless in not just only love, but her ability to share that part of her that’s a songwriter, the part of her that doesn’t feel comfortable singing her song. I mean, this girl has completely given up. She’s completely depressed. She doesn’t think she has what it takes. And then she meets this superstar, and he believes in her, and she’s overwhelmed by that belief. That’s what drives her out there. And I think that’s what people are connecting to when they watch it. Ronson: It’s melancholy and sad, but it’s incredibly uplifting because of the performance in the film. And the way he brings her on stage helps the song too. Lukas Nelson did a great arrangement for that performance. Gaga being nice and deferential told me, “You know, if you want to do another version of the song for the soundtrack, we can.” But the minute I saw the trailer, I was like, “If that’s what the song sounds like, I’m not touching it. It’s perfect.” Gaga: When she first goes on stage, she goes to the back mike, further away from the audience. She’s scared. I remember, from an acting perspective, putting myself in a place of “as if.” As if I’ve never performed in front of an audience before, as if I’ve never sang for that many people in my life. But I was also able to just look at the circumstances as they were. I have never been an actress in a leading role, and I was about to go out there and perform and be in a movie with Bradley Cooper. So when I went out there and put my hands over my face, that was real. That was exactly how I felt. It was that fear. It was that insecurity. It was that “I’m not good enough, but I’m doing this anyway because he inspired me.” Then he nods to me to go to the front of the stage, and she’s so into it and launches into that sort of ad libbed bridge … the reason she’s so into it, quite frankly, is because he sang to her, “I’m fallin’ in all the good times, I find myself longing for change.” And that change has occurred! And she listens. And she goes up there and gives it everything she has. And that moment — what you call an aria in the middle of the song — we knew what that was going to sound like, and yet it’s different because she’s been listening. That’s what I love so much about the song. It’s not just about talking to each other but really listening and then coming to a strong connection. Ronson: In the demo of the song, she did that more like a falsetto. Even if it wasn’t in the movie, it would be one of the most intense vocal performances of any song this year. It feels like one of those old Maxell commercials where the guy gets blown back. But that’s just Gaga. Who else can do that? I always love the Gaga-ness of the way she plays with words too. She is the queen of that [stuff], and it makes the song so weirdly interesting. I remember asking her with “Shallow”: “Do your Gaga [stuff] and play with the words.” And she came up with “In the sha-ha, sha-ha-ha-low.” Gaga: [Sings] In the sha-ha, sha-ha-ha-low. You know, how do we make this something that is actually easier to sit in than it really is? Existing in the shallow where nobody wants to be, and yet we’re in it all the time. To say that we’re not in a shallow world at this moment, especially in America, would be a big lie. So how do we make this part something they can relish in? “We’re far from the shallow now.” But now that I look back at it, I can sing about it. I can play with it. I can look at it fondly, because now I’m in the deep. Ronson: Bradley talks about how you could see the song, see the film, as an addict’s journey or that of a crestfallen, fledgling pop star, or you could just see it as heartbreak. “Shallow,” I don’t want to speak on anyone’s behalf, but the drowning could be drowning in heartache, drowning in the bottle, drowning, having your dreams shattered. Between the four of us in the room, we were going through all those things at the time. And that can’t help but work its way into the music. Gaga: That’s absolutely true. There were sober people in the room and not sober people in the room. I don’t mean that, like, we were actually drinking or not drinking. But when you’re working with this caliber of writers — and I have to give it up to these guys, they’re amazing, wonderful musicians — you bring everything to the table. You bring your heart. You bring that library of your life with you. And when you’re working, you don’t even have to try — those books are flying out of your soul and landing in the song in some way. “It’s a song that gives you wings to fly." Ronson: I re-recorded a version for when Ally plays at the Forum toward the end of the film when Jackson is committing suicide. Gaga wanted a version that would sound like Ally would sound playing it with her band. It’s more like a giant ’80s “Shallow” with big drums. A little more pop-tastic. Gaga: I wonder if we’ll put that out someday. The studio version of the song is very different too and very good. But it didn’t sound like Jackson enough. It was getting in the way of the storytelling. That’s why we used Lukas’ arrangement, the one with Jackson’s band. I didn’t want Ally to sound anything like me. She was inspired by Jackson, and it’s their song together. Ronson: The thing that I love about this is that Bradley Cooper is legitimately singing on a global No. 1 pop song. That just seems so bizarre and wild. But everything about this song and this movie feels that way. Have you seen that meme with this sweet suburban woman sitting in her kitchen and there’s a guy looking over her shoulder wearing a ski mask, and it says, “Me during a home invasion when the burglar tells me he hasn’t seen the trailer for ‘A Star Is Born’ ”? That sums it all up to me. I still can’t believe it. Gaga: “You know, I snuck in to see the movie, but I can only watch the first half. And then I have to pull myself away from it. I’m still too much inside the character, and I’m still so connected to Jackson in a way that is all-consuming. I’d be lying to you if I said I can stay and watch the whole thing. Some of my favorite scenes exist in the end, but on a visceral level, I have to pull away from it. I know I’ll get past that and I’m excited for when I’ll be able to watch it all the way through again. “I guess Ally’s still in there. And she was in the room with Mark and Anthony and Andrew and she was there on that stage when I sang that middle part before that last bridge. This is a woman releasing years and years of fear in front of a giant audience, and I think I released years of fear that night as well. I love her.” This article originally appeared here.

Lady Gaga joined Lin-Manuel Miranda for Variety' s Actors on Actors to talk about their heavy award season contender movies; A Star is Born and Mary Poppins Returns. Both actors discovered that though they have very different careers, they also share a ton of similarities when it comes to being performers You can watch the full 50-minute interview below or read a portion of the transcript under the video. Few artists have been decorated as frequently as Lin-Manuel Miranda. The impresario has won a Pulitzer and shared a Kennedy Center Honors designation for the stage bombshell “Hamilton”; he’s also won an Emmy, three Tonys and three Grammys. He’s in the Oscar hunt this year for “Mary Poppins Returns,” the Disney sequel to which Miranda adds theater-kid vim. Fellow New Yorker Lady Gaga shares Miranda’s knack for winning awards — she’s the recipient of a Golden Globe and six Grammys — and his theatrical brio. In 2018’s update of “A Star Is Born,” Gaga brought persona-erasing humility and full voice to a role previously inhabited by Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand. Unlike her predecessors, Gaga had next to no big-screen experience. But the movie’s seismic impact lends her one more common bond with Miranda: Both now enjoy a future in which any artistic reinvention seems newly possible. Lin-Manuel Miranda: What I feel when I watched the movie was the incredible amount of trust. I’m curious how Bradley [Cooper] prepped you, because he’s a first-time director. Lady Gaga: Looking back on my career, I created all these characters for each of my albums, because I was not an actress. I created the star of my own movie, and that was it. When I have created characters on my own through my music, I have complete control. When you’re dealing with a script, costume department, props department, set design, lighting and producers, you have to collaborate with other people. Miranda: What you just said resonated with me. I started writing musicals because I really wanted to be in musicals. I didn’t see that many opportunities for myself. If you’re a Puerto Rican dude, you get Paul from “A Chorus Line.” When Rob Marshall came to me with this part, it felt like the fruit of the harvest, of the seeds I planted when I started writing “In the Heights.” It was like, “Oh, I don’t have to write the whole thing?!” And we had three months of pre-production on “Mary Poppins Returns.” That’s more than Broadway shows get. It was, in a way, a perfect first step for me. Gaga: So the preparation process felt similar to putting on a Broadway show? Miranda: Totally. Rob comes from theater. It was just a similar language. Emily Blunt actually gave me the best advice on the first day. She said, “Rob is paying more attention than we are. He’s not gonna move on until he’s got what he needs. He’s just not gonna move on until we’ve got it, so your only job is to give him everything.” That’s the gig. Gaga: It is the gig. What’s interesting is that when I’m performing onstage with my music, there’s this tremendous connection with the audience. You feed off of the energy in the room, and it changes every night. What I’ve found working on film was I was much more interested in being completely present with who I was communicating with on camera, and very acutely aware that it was important for me to forget that there were cameras around me. I’m actually the type of actress that the director has to find me, because I will not make sure they’re getting the shot. Once we start to go, I really was Ally. Everything around me, other than what is meant to be in the circumstances, disappears. When we break out into song in [“A Star Is Born”], it’s because we are singing onstage. Miranda: Or in a parking lot. Gaga: Exactly. When you guys break into song, it’s almost like you have to break into song because you can’t say it simply with words. Miranda: Rob Marshall is born in the wrong era. He would have been at home making MGM musicals with [Gene] Kelly and Fred Astaire, because he has that thing. And he rehearses it like it’s a show. So that big dance number around all the lamps? We did that as an eight-minute continuous number. There weren’t cuts between each dance move. You rehearse it like you’re doing the show in front of a live audience. Then he just has 20 cameras on it, and he gets the best stuff. Gaga: That’s sort of how we did it. Except we didn’t rehearse before. We sang live every single time, with earwigs so that we could hear the recordings but get a completely clean vocal on the mic. Then we would shoot over and over again in a continuous take so we would have different things to pull from. Miranda: The fun for me was realizing, all right, “what’s the adrenaline source?” Because I get so much adrenaline from the audience when I’m performing in “Hamilton.” Who’s in the front row? What’s the energy? Is it a matinee energy? Is it “these people had this date circled in blood” energy? For me, the adrenaline source became “we’re never going to be here again.” What about you? Gaga: I like to draw from my deck of cards of all my experiences and my sense memory and do my sorcery before I get to set. For [the “Shallow” scene], I was like, “This could actually be quite simple. I’ve never been a lead actress in a movie before.” I’m walking onto the stage with Bradley Cooper, this huge, incredible film actor, so this is brand-new. I was able to kind of put myself in that circumstance a little bit more simply. It was funny because he was so kind; he asked a lot of my fans to be extras for scenes where there were fans in the audience. Shelley, our first A.D., would come out and say, “Whatever you do, please do not hold up any Lady Gaga signs! If you have a cowboy hat, please make sure it’s not pink, because that looks like ‘Joanne.’” Something about acting, knowing that my fans were in the audience was quite exhilarating for me. I had to forget, of course, that they were my fans out there, but before I went onstage, I would go, “My fans are out there, and they’re watching me act in a movie. That is my circumstance.” I know that you’re very active on Twitter and that you have a relationship with your fans, and so do I. I was wondering about that, because I really admire that you love kindness as much as I do. Miranda: It’s interesting because I think I got on social media like anybody else did — but I think the worst thing you could give me is an audience in my pocket. That’s a dangerous thing to give a theater person. Gaga: You just perform constantly. Miranda: I think of it as a literal megaphone, and that swings both good and bad. You can bring light to issues that you care about deeply. If you use it 24 hours a day, everyone ignores the crazy guy on the corner with a megaphone. I feel like I get more kindness back because that’s what I choose to put out in the world. You are incredible on social media, and the way you rally your fans around causes that are important to you — that’s an incredible way to use your voice. Gaga: Well, when I started to perform out in clubs and I was doing three shows a night, nonstop traveling around the country, I would look out into the audience and see my fans. I was like, “I’m pretty sure I’m looking at myself.” I always felt like a loser, like I didn’t belong. I’m not saying that all of my fans are that way, but there were so many of them that I couldn’t ignore it. I then saw very quickly once my career started to take off that, yeah, like you said, there’s this megaphone. What am I going to do with this megaphone? What I have found with Twitter is it’s this awesome thing we can use, and it’s also a toilet. It can be totally dangerous, so the more that we stick together and promote good things happening in the world … I usually don’t like to do this because I feel like when you do charity work, having a camera crew with you — it’s the Catholic in me — it’s not selfless. But since the California fires, I went to a shelter. The first time I went, I took photos with people that were there that wanted them. The second time that I went, I was like, “I’m going to post about this because I want people to know that it’s important to do kind things.” I just want to always be on the side of kindness. Miranda: OK. Music, check. Big movie, you’re incredible in it, check. Do you ever want to do eight shows a week on Broadway? Gaga: Check. I’d love that. That was my dream. I think I’ve seen “Rent” probably 30 times. Miranda: ”Rent’s” the one that got me writing. I saw it for my 17th birthday. I always loved musicals, but they never took place in the present. Gaga: I lost my mind when I saw “Rent.” I used to go — you stand in line and put your name in, and they call a raffle. Miranda: They invented the lottery system. Gaga: I’m like staring at Maureen as she’s belting. I’m just like, I just want to be Maureen. For many years, record executives told me I was too theater. Miranda: Any record executive using “theater” as pejorative, you know you’re dead to me. This article originally appeared on Variety.

Lady Gaga joined Glenn Close, Kathryn Hahn, Regina King, Nicole Kidman and Rachel Weisz for the Hollywood Reporter's annual Actress Roundtable. They opened up about Hollywood and how it has changed, and the #MeToo movement. Read a transcript of the discussion, as well as clips, below. "Can we all just not wear our pants," joked Kathryn Hahn as she moved quickly from a photo shoot in her (yes, pantsless) red mini tuxedo dress to her place at The Hollywood Reporter's annual Actress Roundtable. Once seated, Private Life star Hahn, 45, joined The Wife's Glenn Close, 71; A Star Is Born's first-timer Lady Gaga, 32; Nicole Kidman, 51 (in the awards race this year with both Boy Erased and Destroyer); If Beale Street Could Talk's Regina King, 47; and The Favourite's Rachel Weisz, 48, for an intense discussion (edited here for length and clarity) that began with the impact of the #MeToo and Time's Up movements on the daily lives of actors and ended with a candid back-and-forth on how children influence your career and life choices. How has each of you experienced change in Hollywood over the past year? Or how have you not? KATHRYN HAHN I got a Laverne & Shirley credit on this movie [Tamara Jenkins' fertility drama Private Life]. That's when you are side by side with your co-star, which is a rarity. It usually would have been the dude and, you know, the gal. GLENN CLOSE Was the dude happy about it? HAHN You know, he was. It was Paul Giamatti. He was like, "Of course. This is exactly what should happen." LADY GAGA That's what is so exciting with the #MeToo movement and Time's Up, to see men coming to stand by our side and say, "We want you to be loud. We want to hear your voices." It's really remarkable. NICOLE KIDMAN We got this film [Karyn Kusama's undercover cop drama Destroyer] made, which probably would have been even harder before. I see that as part of the movement. And hopefully, there will be a lot more films with female directors. CLOSE I've been a part of two films that took 14 years to make. The first one was [2011's] Albert Nobbs and the second was [Bjorn Runge's marital drama] The Wife. It was actually hard to find actors who wanted to be in a movie called The Wife. It's two women writers. And, you know, starring a woman. No one wanted to [make it] and, most of the money, if not all the money, came from Europe. GAGA Your character in that film, the importance of her voice is so powerful. Looking back on your career through the lens of 2018, is there a time when you wish that you had spoken up? CLOSE I had one very subtle moment, when I think back on it. Nothing that threatened me, but just so subtle. It was at an audition, and the very famous, very big actor that I was reading with put his hand on my thigh. It had nothing to do with the character. Or the scene. It just froze me up. Because you're trying to do the scene, and all of a sudden you think, "Why is he doing that?" But now I realize … if I had said, "Oh, that feels good," who knows what [he was] trying to elicit? Or if it was even conscious on his part? But I really understand the freeze syndrome. Lady Gaga Talks 'A Star Is Born': "It Was Important to Me That I Gave Something I Don't Always Give" | Actress Roundtable GAGA It's a trauma response. REGINA KING I was talking to Maggie Gyllenhaal — just because we both have been acting for so long, and were young when we started — and I feel like I was very much aware of the pay differences between men and women. I knew it and I just said, "Yeah, OK. That's there. But I'm focusing on the work." So now it's like, "Oh, shoot. I never had a conversation with any of my female peers that were experiencing the same thing." HAHN Or even your team … KING My team, my agent, any of them … HAHN It was just assumed. KING Not that I was OK with it, but I was focusing on the art. HAHN That phrase of "gratitude," which we just had to hold on to … RACHEL WEISZ Grateful for … CLOSE The work. KIDMAN Having the job. HAHN Just to be able to be there. CLOSE To have a job. HAHN Which takes away your … KING Power. And those conversations are happening now? KING Yes, they are happening. It's an all-inclusive sisterhood now, that, I think, is pretty freaking fantastic. CLOSE We have to make sure that it doesn't go back. It will become part of our culture because we will not let it go away. GAGA When I started in the music business when I was around 19, it was the rule, not the exception, that you would walk into a recording studio and be harassed. It was just the way that it was. So I do wish that I had spoken up sooner. I did speak up about it. I was assaulted when I was young, and I told people. And, you know, there was a "boys club." Nobody wants to lose their power, so they don't protect you because if they say something, it takes some of their power away. What I hope is that these conversations come together — that it's not just about equal pay on one side … or equal billing over here … and then assault on this side. But that it all comes together and that this movement is all of those things. KIDMAN The sharing of information is so important. Working with younger actresses, I say, "Ask me anything and I'll answer. Ask me anything financially. If you need advice, just ask. I can only tell you what I advise and you might take it or leave it. But it's nice to have access to information." It's hard, especially if you are very young in this industry starting out, because you are trying to be good and obedient and to not be troublesome. But it's lovely to have a bunch of people that go, "Come ask us. We've got some experience and we're willing to share it." WEISZ I think about those young actresses who feel empowered and hopefully … I have a real problem with the idea of "strong women characters." Well, does that mean we have muscles or something? No one ever says that to a man. But [I want] young girls growing up [to] see stories being told where a woman takes a central role. Where she is not peripheral to the story. She's driving the story, and so, you as a kid can go, "Oh, that's me. I can identify." So, it's like a funny thing that [these stories] are coming together as women have been speaking up about harassment. I don't know if it is a coincidence that suddenly you (to Kidman) could get [financing] for your film, you (to Close) could get your film made. The Favourite apparently took 20 years to make. Because there is lesbianism and three females at the center of it. Glenn Close Says 'The Wife' Took 14 Years to Make | Actress Roundtable CLOSE I would think people would want to see that. (Laughter.) HAHN Delicious, right? Three women getting it on. WEISZ What was wrong with that 20 years ago? I don't know what's changed in the culture. GAGA I don't think it has changed. WEISZ But is [the exposure of] sexual harassment connected to how we are getting our stories told now? I can't figure out the chicken and the egg. Gaga, when you walked on set, and even before you signed on for A Star Is Born, how concerned were you that the performance would be compared to your own career? GAGA Well, first of all, I wanted to be an actress before I wanted to be a singer or musician. I went to the Lee Strasburg Institute. I studied at Circle in the Square. I studied Stanislavski technique, Meisner, Adler … I was really obsessed with method acting. For many years, I have created characters for myself. Because I did not make it as an actress. So, I made characters that I could be — so that I could be one. They were always in some way related to the woman that I wanted to sing to, and a part of me. So, like for my album Joanne, I had this vision of a woman with a baby in one hand and a pinot grigio in the other, in cutoff jeans. And her hair wild and in a bun. HAHN That's my Saturday. GAGA With Bradley [Cooper], what I did was, I said, "OK, I'm going to have to become someone that I do not have complete control over." I dyed my hair very early, before we started filming. I started to dress like her. I was writing music for the soundtrack and helping to hone Ally's sound, which was essentially something that was going to arise out of Jackson's sound, because she fell in love with him. I wanted Ally to be nothing like me. This was very important to me because the truth is, I am nothing like Ally. I created Gaga. Kathryn Hahn Finds Excitement in "Personal, Human Stories" Such as 'Private Life' | Actress Roundtable Is there a part you always wanted to play that you know you can't? KING A Joan of Arc-type character. Someone in history that wasn't black but I thought was a pretty amazing woman. That's interesting because there has been some controversy in the past year over who should be playing which characters. Scarlett Johansson was going to portray a transgender character and dropped out when there was backlash. Who gets to play what role? CLOSE That's a tricky question. First of all, what we are up to is a craft. And in your craft, you should be able to — within a certain reasonable parameter — play anyone. But there are diverse actors and actresses that have not been served. So it's up to the industry to nurture those actors. Nurture the trans actors, the people who don't get a chance. And then, the best person for the part should play it. KIDMAN The industry and the world are in enormous change right now. But maybe it's just the actor in me: Ultimately, it's the director's choice. Film is the director's medium, it's their vision ultimately. So, they're going to cast who they think is right for their film. KING But wouldn't it be fantastic if I did play Joan of Arc? GAGA I absolutely could see you do that. HAHN There are so many roles in the theater that would be amazing to play, that I can't wait for my kids to be a little bit older and to be able to get back to the theater. KIDMAN I did it in London recently, and it was hard. You miss bedtime. I can't miss bedtime. That makes me cry. GAGA There is a strength in vulnerability. What I really admire about what you all do — because this is new for me — is the places that you have to go to, deep, deep down every time, to play a role. When I'm onstage performing and doing music, I have the audience. It's like this adrenaline rush, and I'm talking to people and shouting at them. [But when you are acting,] there is no way that you're not going to the depths of who you are, into a very scary place. I just have to commend each and every one of you for it. Because I still feel like I am recovering from playing this role. WEISZ How unusual is it to see a woman work through her vulnerability and resilience and then to be born in that final moment [of A Star Is Born]? And a man to sacrifice himself for that purpose? It's quite unusual, don't you think? Regina King Praises 'If Beale Street Could Talk' Director Barry Jenkins | Actress Roundtable GAGA The way Bradley chose to end the film was extremely of the times. It was an unorthodox way, but it was the authentic way. And it changed as we were filming. The script was being rewritten and we had a trove of songs, so even on the day [of shooting], Bradley would be like, "No, we're going to do this song. Not this song. Switch it out." I'd be in my trailer at the piano, getting ready. Is there a piece of advice you got early on that has stuck with you? KIDMAN I was taught really early on never to cut a take. Only the director gets to cut. It can go off into God knows where, but something fantastic may come out of it. CLOSE Because I started in the theater, it took me so long to realize you didn't have to be perfect on the whole take. WEISZ I had a small part in a film and the director said to me, "Don't touch your hair." I don't know. That's less profound advice than yours. (Laughs.) HAHN I always touch my hair. KIDMAN Well, you've got great hair. I want to touch your hair. GAGA Do you feel like the cameras disappear? Because for me, they do. Like, I know that they are there, but when I am in the scene … I really feel them disappear. HAHN Yeah. CLOSE A wonderful direction I've never forgotten was, if you're lost, just drown in each other's eyes. KIDMAN Awesome. Rachel Weisz Says the Women Characters in 'The Favourite' Were Fully Formed | Actress Roundtable GAGA I like that. I'm going to take that. CLOSE It's so wonderful, because the most powerful thing that we have as human beings are our two eyes looking into two other eyes. HAHN There's this Alan Watts quote that I recently came upon: "You are under no obligation to be the person that you were five minutes ago." Which I think is a great way to be as a human. WEISZ Actually, you just made me think of some advice. I was feeling so shallow here. Like, touching hair? "She's real superficial, this lady." When you play a character, if someone says to you, "Your character wouldn't do that," that's just not true. Whatever happens in the take, even when it goes wrong and you want to say "cut" and you don't, that is your character. Whatever happens, that's the character. GAGA It's so interesting that you say that, because I'm sitting here listening to you talk, going like, "I do the opposite." I do certain things when I sing and I'm onstage. I have a certain way about me when I perform. And — sorry, I just touched my hair. (Laughter.) But I was really conscious and I wanted it to be pointed out when I was doing something that would look decidedly like me, the way that my fans see me. Because I wanted Ally to be so different. So I focused a lot on the way that I sang and the way that I moved my jaw. I also focused on the way that I held the microphone and the way that I communicated with the audience. I just wanted it to be so different. But it's so interesting to hear you say that, because during the scenes when I wasn't singing … I was doing more of that, letting things happen. How far do you immerse yourself in your roles? Nicole, on Destroyeryou play a cop … KIDMAN I entered so deeply into her. I don't always do this with a character, but this one I had to because I didn't want to feel like I was ever shifting into a performance: I stayed in character the whole time. I had to really learn how to use guns. I had no idea how. So I put in a lot of time. I live in Tennessee. I have a gun range just down from my house. I would go down there and I could shoot anything that is in that film. GAGA Living the role … how do you [separate] what's happening in your personal life when that is going on? KIDMAN Because of my kids. CLOSE Did you stay in the character when you went home? KIDMAN You didn't have to call me Erin, but it just kind of enters the psyche. My husband was like, "I cannot wait for this thing to end." CLOSE That was like when my daughter came up to me and said, "I want you. I want all of you." And she was 3. KIDMAN Children of artists … children of actors … CLOSE They feel your distraction, if you are working … WEISZ Cellphones can contribute to that as well, I think. KIDMAN They do feel it. My children have a musician father and an actress mother … but they are so loved. We are all in that position, right? But it's always that balance I find the hardest thing. I find it so hard. And, hopefully you build the intimacy with your child. (To Close) You have a fantastic relationship with your daughter. You've been through so much together, and they have an understanding of the artistic path. CLOSE The hardest thing for a child living through my [fame] is that they sense when people want their parents. It's the kind of lust of celebrity, and I think that can be very frightening to a child. Because it's like, "She's my mother." When Annie was really little and we would go in an airport and she'd see that face coming toward me, she would just go, "Stay away. She's mine." KING When [my son] sees it coming, and I may not be paying attention, he'll go, "Go to the left. Go to the left." Nicole Kidman Stayed in Character the Whole Time for 'Destroyer' | Actress Roundtable What's the best feedback that you've gotten from your kids? KIDMAN I did Aquaman, and I did it for them, actually, because when you do something like Destroyer you say, "They're never going to be seeing this." But you do Aquaman, and it's like, "Oh my gosh." I ate a gelatin goldfish in a scene, and they thought that was my best work. (Laughter.) WEISZ My son … the last two plays that I've done, if he's in the other room and I'm learning lines and I'm saying them out loud, he'll just shout from the other room, "True! False! False!" Because he knows better than I guess anyone when Mom is being a big old fakie. KIDMAN Wow. CLOSE Do you get to do it back to him? (Laughs.) HAHN That's incredible. GAGA Am I the only one here with no children? I'm the only one. KIDMAN [Weisz's story is] a great thing to be able to tell women. Because you can definitely have a child and have your career. You can do it. I mean, you're going to give up things. There is going to be compromise. But you can jump in and do it and it's fine. So many young actresses say to me, "How do you …?" I'm like, "If you want your baby, have your baby. Have it. If you don't want it, don't have it." But you can if you want to. GAGA It's special having children in your lives, that when you have that psychological change as you are taking on a role, that they sort of snap you out of it a bit, in a way. KING You make it work. CLOSE I thought a lot about this in the context of The Wife and my mom. Because my mom was very interesting, very smart … she never graduated from high school. She fell in love with my dad when she was 18. And she, at the end of her life, said to me, "I feel like I've accomplished nothing." I think about that a lot because we have our children and the nurturing/natural thing that we do as women, and then we have the need for personal fulfillment. We need to feed our souls, and our hearts. And that's what our work does. GAGA This actually made me want to have kids. That sounds lovely. Last question's a fun one: Who is a character that you've played that you would like to have dinner with? CLOSE The Marquise de Merteuil [from Dangerous Liaisons]. HAHN I completely forgot about that. KIDMAN Virginia Woolf. WEISZ Sorry to talk about The Favourite, but I would go back to 1708 England and have some tea with Queen Anne. KING Margie Hendrix. She was the singer in Ray, one of his lovers. HAHN Maybe I would say the rabbi [on Transparent]. I think that I could use a rabbi these days. Just to sit down and have tea with. GAGA Just because I've only been in one movie, doesn't mean that I wouldn't want to meet Ally! OK? (Laughs.) I just want to say, I was in Machete Kills. This interview originally appeared here.

Warner Bros. has officially submitted A Star Is Born for consideration this upcoming Awards Season including The Oscars. The movies was suggested for 15 categories. Lady Gaga has been sent for Best Actress, and the movie as Original Picture. Previously, three songs from the soundtrack were submitted for the Best Original Song category: Always Remember Us This Way, I’ll Never Love Again (Film Version), and Shallow. But as of November 2, Warner Bros. has updated their Best Original Song submissions to just Shallow. With three songs submitted, only two could be nominated for the Best Original Song category. With the slight chance of that occurring, the votes would likely be split against herself resulting in a loss which is most likely why Warner Bros. has decided on just one consideration. Here you can find the full submissions list: The Official Academy Nominations will be announced earlier next year, but in the meantime we wish Lady Gaga and the rest of the cast the best of luck!

Lady Gaga attended ELLE’s 25th annual Women in Hollywood event yesterday in Beverly Hills. She was one of many women honoured, along with fellow November Elle issue cover stars Shonda Rhimes, Sarah Paulson, Charlize Theron, Yara Shahidi, Angela Bassett, Keira Knightley, Danai Gurira, Lupita Nyong'o, and Mia Farrow. Gaga walked the carpet in a statement piece by Marc Jacobs accompanied with Giuseppe Zanotti heels. She ultimately decided to wear this over-sized men's suit to make a stand against what Hollywood expects women to appear as. Mentioning in her speech below, she says: "I tried on dress after dress today getting ready for this event, one tight corset after another, one heel after another, a diamond, a feather, thousands of beaded fabrics, and the most beautiful silks in the world. But to be honest, I felt sick to my stomach. And i asked myself, 'What does it mean to be a woman in Hollywood?' We are not just objects to entertain the world. We are not members of a giant beauty pageant meant to be pit against one another for the pleasure of the public. We, women in Hollywood, we are voices. We have deep thoughts and ideas and beliefs and values about the world and we have the power to speak and be heard and fight back when we are silenced." Gaga made a long acceptance speech, opening up about mental health, her own sexual assault, and encouraged women to lift each other up using their voices. She also confirmed her engagement to Christian Carino following tons of speculation. Jennifer Lopez presented the award to Gaga. After the dinner, Gaga and her fellow Women In Hollywood recipients made their way to the press carpet to take some photos with their new awards.

I feel like I’m still a fetus,” says Lady Gaga, looking impeccably glamorous in a wide-belted black Alaïa dress, stabby heels, extravagant lashes, and dark brows, her platinum hair framing her face in soft waves. What she looks like (no doubt deliberately) is a midcentury Italian film star—Monica Vitti in some long-lost Antonioni picture, or a tiny, blond Sophia Loren. What she means is that she feels like she’s just getting started as an artist—that she’s only accomplished a fraction of what she still plans to do—but I have a hard time wrapping my head around this notion, considering the decade she’s just had. Ten years ago, with the release of her first album, The Fame, Lady Gaga went from struggling burlesque performer and New York club kid to global pop phenomenon in what seemed like the blink of an eye. Since then, she’s put out five studio albums, one soundtrack album, and 18 singles; performed at the Super Bowl; and won six Grammys and a Golden Globe, among other things. She’s won fashion awards and collaborated with famous artists and sung duets with Tony Bennett. Two years ago, while filming a Netflix documentary about her life, Gaga: Five Foot Two, she landed the leading role in a major Hollywood movie. She would play the Janet Gaynor/Judy Garland/Barbra Streisand role in A Star Is Born, opposite Bradley Cooper. All of which is to say that if anyone inhabits a parallel universe where the bar for achievement is set so impossibly high that Lady Gaga ranks as artistically prenatal, it’s probably just Lady Gaga. A few days after our meeting, A Star Is Born premieres at the Venice Film Festival. Lady Gaga is there in a Valentino gown adorned with billowy pink ostrich feathers. Halfway through the screening, a fluke lightning accident momentarily interrupts the film, which nonetheless goes on to get an eight-minute standing ovation and mostly rapturous reviews. In 2016, while accepting the Golden Globe award for her role in Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story: Hotel, Lady Gaga said that she’d wanted to be an actress before she wanted to be a singer, but that music had worked out first. Now that acting has worked out as well, it’s unclear what more she could do. Mars colony, maybe. Flying cars. Universal health care. “The character of Ally is informed by my life experience. But I also wanted to make sure that she was not me. It was a cadence of both.” Lady Gaga has a commanding presence. She sits like an Olympic gymnast nailing a landing. Chatting with her in the kitchen of her otherworldly, six-acre Mediterranean-style estate, which features an eight-horse stable, a dressage rink, a bowling alley, a saltwater pool, and a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean, I have the feeling that I may have temporarily crossed over into this other, extra dimension. The woman comes across as a sweetheart, but the artist is a machine. In person, she’s warm but guarded, friendly but cautious, passionate but preternaturally poised. Her house is cozy and filled with people—assistants; her manager; her mom, Cynthia, visiting from New York. (“Don’t we look alike?” Lady Gaga asks after introducing me. They really do.) The house is more traditional than you’d expect, more befitting a Stefani Germanotta (her given name) made insanely good than the pop performance artist who once wore a dress made out of meat to the MTV Video Music Awards. I mean, the French provincial sofas are draped in quilts. The fireplace is flanked by a big TV and an old Italian movie poster of A Star Is Born starring Judy Garland, a gift from Gaga’s boyfriend, CAA agent Christian Carino. It’s all slightly disorienting. We could be in a Nancy Meyers movie. Or a Star Trek episode. A decade into her career, Lady Gaga is being born again, as a movie star, and she truly is a revelation. This might just be the most remarkable thing about A Star Is Born—that, beyond the fact that she’s unrecognizable, she feels new. Among the most notable things about her character, Ally, is how stripped down she looks, how vulnerable. Gaga has shown glimpses of this before. We’ve seen it in her hilarious Saturday Night Live sketches, her album Joanne, and her documentary, in which she appears in sweatpants. “The character of Ally is informed by my life experience,” Lady Gaga says. “But I also wanted to make sure that she was not me. It was a cadence of both.” Ally is talented but insecure. She writes but won’t perform her own songs. She’s been dissuaded from pursuing her dreams by an industry that doesn’t believe in her, that tells her she looks wrong for the part. She reluctantly allows Jackson Maine (played by Cooper) to draw her into his world, to involve her in his music, until she meets the manager who begins her transformation into a commercial pop star. Metallic pleated dress, Givenchy, $9,490.Stainless steel watch, Tudor, $2,200 .Leather pumps, Manolo Blahnik, $695. Hair by Frederic Aspiras for Amika Haircare; makeup by Sarah Tanno for Marc Jacobs Beauty; manicure by Miho Okawara for Miho Nails; produced by Gabe Hill at GE Projects For all Lady Gaga’s talents as a singer, songwriter, and actress, it’s her metatalent for fame—a condition she single-mindedly pursued, investigated, interrogated, and named an album, an EP, and a fragrance after—that catapulted her into global stardom. It’s on this theme, one on which the movie largely hinges, where Gaga and her fictional counterpart, Ally, diverge the most: Once Gaga made the decision to become a performer, she didn’t let anything stop her. Early in her career, she understood that Stefani Germanotta, the classically trained Catholic schoolgirl, was talented enough to be successful, but that only Lady Gaga could erupt on the global scene, fully formed. Ally’s character, by contrast, is like a window into a Sliding Doors–like look at how things might have gone. “When I watched the film for the first time,” Gaga says, “I said, Oh my gosh, I thought she was really sad at the end of the movie, but I didn’t realize how sad she really was at the beginning. She’s really kind of a depressed girl. She works as a catering girl. She has her friend Ramon, who is very important to her. She takes care of her dad at home and takes care of all the drivers who come and have breakfast in the morning. But she’s truly given up on herself as a musician." This latest version of A Star Is Born is the fourth iteration of the classic melodrama about the effects of fame and addiction on a relationship. Cooper’s Jackson Maine is an alcoholic rock superstar on the wane who falls in love with a singer-songwriter he happens to meet at a drag club, where he’s stopped for a drink after a concert because he can’t face going home. “He said to me, ‘There can be a hundred people in the room, and 99 of them won't believe in you, but all you need is one. Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper first met years ago on the set of Saturday Night Live, but it wasn’t until she performed at Sean Parker’s 2016 cancer benefit that they connected. Lady Gaga’s reps had alerted her that the actor would be in attendance, and that he planned to direct A Star Is Born and was looking to cast the female lead. Lady Gaga knew she wanted it. She sang “La Vie en Rose,” which ended up in the movie as the first song Jackson watches Ally perform—the song that makes him fall in love with her. “I was completely blown away,” Cooper says of that night. “I called her agent and said, ‘Can I meet with her?’ And then, the next day, she said yes, and I drove up to her house, and then that was it.” Gaga says the connection was instantaneous. “Before I knew it, I was making him pasta, feeding him, and we were talking and laughing. Then he wanted to hear us sing together, and asked if I would sing a song called ‘Midnight Special’ with him. I printed out the sheet music, and I brought it out to the piano, and I was so nervous. And so I’m sight-reading the music at the piano, and we start to sing, and I hear Bradley’s voice, and I just stopped playing, and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, Bradley, you can sing.’ It’s incredible,” she says. Once she was cast, Cooper and screenwriters Eric Roth and Will Fetters worked on the script while Gaga worked on the soundtrack. “I wrote it for her, to play it. I asked her so many questions, and wanted to mine so much of the things that she told me. That completely formed the creation of Ally,” Cooper says. “We really were very vulnerable [together]. I had a lot of belief in her magic. It’s one thing to have a sense of it, and then watch it, before your eyes, every day, shooting.” In order to portray an unknown singer, Gaga drew from her insecurity as an actress. “I will never forget the first scene we did together in this Mexican restaurant. Bradley got some tacos and brought them to the table. Then he said something to me, but it wasn’t what was in the script, and I didn’t know what to do, so I just said my line. Then he said something else, and I didn’t know what to do because I thought I was just supposed to be saying what was on the page. So I just said another line—the next line. Seeing that I wasn’t going off-script, he said, ‘Are you okay?,’ and I just started to cry.” Through this, she learned to focus more on the story than the lines. So when it came to the concert scenes, where their experience was reversed, she tried the same technique. “When we sang ‘Shallow’ together at the concert, after he runs over and starts to pull me on the stage, I didn’t think, ‘I haven’t made it yet as a singer.’ All I had to do was go, ‘I haven’t made it yet as an actress.’ ” Heather Perry: The thing that I was most impressed with was that she’s a very strong businesswoman. In anything she does, you’re like, She’s such a boss. When Gaga was 14, she was shopping at a boutique on the West Side—singing, as one does—and a sales guy approached her and offered to give her the phone number of his uncle, a vocal coach. Don Lawrence, whom she calls the aortic valve to her career, made time in his schedule to work with her. “Later, I remember we were talking one day—we used to talk a little bit during our lessons, because we liked each other so much—and I said, ‘I just don’t know how I’m gonna make it,’ ” she says. “I was taking meetings with entertainment attorneys and knocking on people’s doors, trying to get them to listen to demos that I made on a four-track Tascam cassette player, and he said to me, ‘There can be a hundred people in the room, and 99 of them won’t believe in you, but all you need is one.’ ” After high school, Gaga enrolled in Collaborative Arts Project 21 through NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts but dropped out after a year—“when I decided to really say, ‘Sorry, Mom and Dad,’ and be a starving artist on the Lower East Side,” she says. She worked three jobs, including one as a go-go dancer. She used to call clubs and pretend to be her own manager. She would haul her piano from gig to gig. Once, while performing at a jazz bar where a crowd of frat boys wouldn’t be quiet, she stripped down to her underwear to get their attention. The moment was a turning point—it made her understand something about commanding attention. “I already knew that she was this authentic, open, raw, real artist who could sing and write songs and be this quadruple threat,” says Heather Parry, who produced the Netflix documentary and executive-produced the film. “But the thing that I was most impressed with was that she’s a very strong businesswoman. In anything she does, you’re like, She’s such a boss.” A Star Is Born, of course, is an evergreen, regenerative parable on the price of fame—which may be a bit of a chestnut, but it works. The best stories about the human experience are the ones in which ordinary people are made to withstand extraordinary forces—alcoholism, physical and emotional trauma, global stardom, the merciless machinery of capitalism. Lady Gaga is an artist. She feels things profoundly. She’s grappled with the inherited trauma of the death of her father’s sister at 19; with the emotional trauma of having been bullied in school and later sexually assaulted; with the physical trauma of a hip injury and surgery that left her with chronic generalized pain. But pain is the ballast against which sublimity takes shape. I can’t make music or act without using and accessing the pain that I have in my heart. I mean, what better place to put it? In one of the most moving scenes of her documentary, Gaga is getting ready to perform at the Super Bowl, but she’s feeling melancholic. “I’m so excited to do it,” she says, “but I can’t help but realize that when I sold 10 million records, I lost Matt [Williams, her ex-boyfriend and ex-stylist]. I sold 30 million and lost Luc [Carl, her ex-boyfriend]. I did a movie and lose Taylor [Kinney, her ex-fiancé]. It’s like a turnover,” she says. “This is the third time I’ve had my heart broken like this.” At the start of A Star Is Born, it’s a scene about Jackson, not Ally, that gets at the heart of the experience. “For me, in music and in acting, I’m always pulling from my past experiences, family dynamics, relationships, pain, happiness, joy, the roller coaster ride of my life—how that has kind of created this beautiful disco ball that’s somehow refracted and fractured,” she says. “The opening moment, where you see him pop some pills, down some booze, hop onstage, and just electrify the audience until the last bass note hits, and the limousine door shuts as the cameras are flashing, and it goes to total silence—this is how I feel as a performer. That’s what it feels like when you go onstage, and there are 20,000 people screaming, and you’re singing, and dancing, and performing, and then the show is over, and there is no sound. It’s emotional.” “Success tests relationships,” she continues. “It tests families. It tests your dynamic with your friends. There is a price to stardom.” But, she adds, “I can’t make music or act without using and accessing the pain that I have in my heart. I mean, what better place to put it? Otherwise, it’s of no good use. This article originally appeared in the November 2018 issue of ELLE.

To celebrate the release of Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper's "A Star Is Born" Soundtrack and BTS' "Answer", Gaga and BTS fan accounts will be hosting a huge streaming party on Twitter! We will be joining fellow Twitter users @btschartdata, @BTS_Billboard, @btsanalytics, @btsvotingteam, @LadyGagaLGN, @gagamonster96, @antpats2, @gagadaily, @LGMonsterFacts and @RDTLadyGaga for the largest streaming party our fanbase has done! An identical playlist on Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal will be provided, interchanging between songs from both albums. The streaming party will take place on both today and Sunday at 7pm EDT (see poster below for more). Be sure to join us! Add the hashtags #BTSxGaga and #ASIBxAnswer to your tweets. Click on the picture to start streaming! Alternative link: http://smarturl.it/ASIBxANSWER

Lady Gaga joined Zane Lowe on Beats 1 to discuss her movie 'A Star Is Born' with Bradley Cooper. You can watch the full interview below.

Lady Gaga appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote her new movie A Star is Born. Gaga sat down with Stephen to discuss the film soundtrack, Bradley's Cooper support and her thoughts on the debate Dr. Ford - Kavanaugh. You can also find some candids of Lady Gaga's arrival at the studios on our gallery.

This article contains A Star is Born spoilers LADY GAGA WANTS TO WEAR EVERY COSTUME, LIVE OUT EVERY TYPE OF KNOWN STARDOM. ‘‘A STAR IS BORN’’ IS JUST HER LATEST REINVENTION. OCT. 2, 2018 Lady Gaga did not so much arrive at the Venice Film Festival this August as she floated into it, a platinum Aphrodite borne on the waves, black stilettos skimming the sea foam. Which is to say, she took a water taxi. An image of her zooming across the canal — perched precariously on the side of the lacquered motorboat in a little black dress, her legs elegantly entwined, her hair shaped into three victory rolls like a crown of croissants, holding a single red rose in one hand and blowing kisses with the other — immediately became a meme. Of course she couldn’t just walk up to the premiere of “A Star Is Born,” the first feature film in which she has a leading role, playing the titular supernova. Walking is for rubes. Sailing, on the other hand, is timeless. It is an activity for sirens, of both the mythological and screen persuasions. It is also joyfully, unapologetically hammy: high camp on the high seas, a playful pastiche of all the celebrity cruisers who came before. In mere hours, several internet sleuths began to post pictures of Gaga on the boat along with photos of classic Hollywood stars, including Marilyn Monroe in a one-piece black bathing suit. The next day, Gaga and Bradley Cooper, her director and co-star, arrived hand in hand to a screening; she was wearing a swingy white dress, the kind made for walking over subway grates. The wink was complete. We could have seen this coming. Lady Gaga is our pop laureate of the grand entrance, our patron saint of operatic ingress. She has never, in a decade of global fame, been content to simply appear in a room; she has to plummet into it, shimmying down a cable like a diamond-encrusted spider. Or she hobbles in, a fembot on fake crutches, a high-fashion Tiny Tim. Before performing at the 2011 Grammys, she claimed to have slept in an oversize translucent egg for 72 hours, so that when she finally emerged, she could feel that she had experienced total “creative, embryonic incubation.” For the first decade of her career, she was often at least seminude when descending every staircase. In her younger, more tenderized years, she trotted into the MTV Video Music Awards in a now-infamous gown and snow boots made of raw beef, not just a sight gag but a full-on olfactory happening, abattoir fabulous. Gaga once described herself as “a show with no intermission,” but it might be more accurate to view her career as a glorious series of overtures; her curtain is always rising. This is why her water ride in Venice elicited such collective delight in the form of vigorous retweeting. She may now be a serious actress, but she hasn’t lost her sense of play. When I met Lady Gaga on a hazy afternoon a few days after her Venice tour, at her house so high up in the Hollywood Hills that I broke through the fog line before I reached it, she was still in full Marilyn mode. Her duckling-blond hair was molded into a halo around her face. Her lips were matte red, slightly overdrawn, an enthusiastic valentine. She was wearing the same towering patent-leather stilettos from the boat and a brown tiger-print wiggle dress, a midcentury silhouette favored by celluloid bombshells that vacuum-seals the calves into place. Her earrings, obsidian chandelier dangles heavy as hood ornaments, cast prismatic shadows on her clavicle and seemed to threaten the general integrity of her otherwise regal posture. Having seen “A Star Is Born” the day before, in which Gaga gives a notably stripped down, unbleached performance, I was slightly jarred as I watched her shuffle through her house (which also happened to have been the house of the avant-garde rocker Frank Zappa before she bought it from his family trust in 2016) in a full face and spike heels. In the film, her character, Ally, starts off makeup-free, a frustrated waitress with mud-puddle hair (Gaga’s natural hue) who long ago abandoned her songwriting dreams and has settled for crooning live covers one night a week at a drag bar, the only woman on the bill. One night, Bradley Cooper, as the shambling, alcoholic rock star Jackson Maine, stumbles into the bar looking for a nightcap and instead discovers a muse — he is bewitched by her performance of “La Vie en Rose” in an Edith Piaf costume complete with thin eyebrows fashioned from electrical tape. Later that night, Jackson asks Ally why she doesn’t pursue a music career. She tells him that she tried, she really did. She just couldn’t find any industry types who could get past her face. They loved the way she sounded, hated the way she looked. Hearing this, Jackson reaches out with a single finger and traces the contours of her nose. While this is on its own an erotic gesture, it is Ally’s reaction that makes the scene: She just breathes as he gently outlines the organ she feels worst about. It’s an arresting moment, in which she seems both receptive and completely assured. Now, as we toured her house, Gaga was as opaque as Ally is transparent. She spoke carefully, in a breathy tone, as if she were in an active séance with an old movie star whose press agent advised her to remain enigmatic and demure. She showed me a bizarre bathroom, where she had found a bed over the shower; she gestured delicately at her backyard, announcing: “Some beautiful lemon trees. It’s a nice place to come and just create.” When we got into the studio, she tiptoed through the cavernous live room, pointing out a grand piano in a voice so quiet I could barely hear her. We made our way to a small alcove with whitewashed walls and 20-foot ceilings, which looked like the storage room of an art museum — an echo chamber, she explained. I asked about the acoustics, in part because it seemed the polite thing to do, but in part because I was trying to open any conversational tap I could find. Whether she was feeling legitimately shy or was simply method-acting as a restrained ingénue, she had yet to speak at full volume. Suddenly, she broke into song. A cappella, unprompted, voce forte, her arms flung out to full wingspan, her head tossed back to bare her throat. She was singing the chorus of “Shallow,” the song she co-wrote for “A Star Is Born” that has become the de facto theme song for the movie. It is sung at the cathartic apex of the trailer (which has been viewed almost 10 million times on YouTube) — the moment when Ally reluctantly steps onto an arena stage for the first time to sing with Jackson. Gaga plays this moment with incredible restraint; it’s hard to imagine her not wanting to storm a stage, but she really sells it. Ally has been down for so long that she hesitates, not fully believing that this is her shot. But then something shifts. She straightens her shoulders, struts out to the microphone and sends her voice soaring over the crowd. In the echo chamber, the words of the song ricocheted, shaking the room: “I’m off the deep end! Watch as I dive in! I’ll never meet the ground!” When Gaga sings, her whole body vibrates. She clenches her fists, squeezes her eyes shut. After she finished belting, Gaga looked beatific, almost giddy, having answered my banal question with undeniable certainty. The acoustics in here, we agreed, were very good. She may now be a serious actress, but she hasn’t lost her sense of play. The title of “A Star Is Born” is misleading and always has been. It implies spontaneous generation, Athena popping fully formed out of Zeus’ forehead. In reality, it is a story about hard work, about the grueling machinations behind celebrity. In each version of the film, fame can destroy (by enabling addiction or worsening self-destructive behaviors), but it can also be a sacred rite; it anoints the truly worthy with laurels and fragrant oils, no matter how aquiline her nose. The narrative takes a nobody and brings her together with a fading legend. He falls in love with her and her artistic potential, and thrusts her straight into the crucible of mass popularity. It is a love story as unshakably perennial as “Romeo and Juliet,” except slightly less crushing, because only the man is doomed and the leading lady gets to walk away from her tragedy triumphant, her suffering noble, her name in neon lights. “A Star Is Born” has never really been a film about an unknown actress shooting across the screen like a rare comet. Instead, from the very beginning, it has always been a film about an already superfamous woman shooting a movie. That’s the real reason the franchise works: It comes with a built-in insurance policy. In 1937, when Janet Gaynor stepped into the role of the farm girl Esther Blodgett in the first version (which was itself a remix of a 1932 drama called “What Price Hollywood?”), she was making a comeback, but she had been a box-office titan of the silent era, the first woman to ever win an Academy Award for acting. Judy Garland, who tackled Esther in 1954 (a studio executive quickly changes her name to Vicki Lester in the film), was a household name at 17, no longer a vaudevillian striver but a minted studio girl, kept on a steady infusion of amphetamines and barbiturates and praise. In 1976, Barbra Streisand, whose character’s name was Esther Hoffman (we have to believe she goes from mieskeit to swan), was already an Oscar winner for playing Fanny Brice, and fresh off another nomination, for “The Way We Were.” These actresses were all at least a decade into their careers, and they used the material less as a coming-out party and more as a victory lap. Of course the Esthers would succeed; their real-life counterparts had already pushed through every obstacle. This is why the lead role is so alluring to divas who want to explore the boundaries of their fame and what they had to endure to lasso it. These actresses, in drag as younger versions of themselves, get to wrestle with their flaws and air out their darkest fears. But we don’t fear for them, not really, because we know how the story turns out. Garland, who always felt so intimidated by the leggy army of MGM blondes that she spent her life making self-deprecating jokes, fashioned herself into the world’s most beloved brunette. Streisand, whose line “Hello, gorgeous” was soaking in wry irony, turned a prominent bridge into a locus of desire. Gaga’s innate New York City toughness brings a different flavor to the role than her predecessors. Where Janet Gaynor plays the starlet as pure and cornfed, Garland plays her as a plucky troubadour in pert ribbon bow ties and Streisand plays her as a wisecracking prima donna in colorful ponchos (hey, it was the ’70s), Gaga’s Ally is more world-weary and knowing. She is the kind of woman who gets into fistfights, who alternately sasses and fusses over her father (Andrew Dice Clay), a chauffeur who once had showbiz aspirations himself but never had a lucky break. When Cooper offered Gaga the role, he told her that “this is what it would be like if you were 31 and had never made it,” and she readily embodies the ferocious hunger of the would-be famous. She’s no innocent when she walks onstage to sing. She knows exactly what to do, and exactly what this will mean for her career. She’s ready to go. Ally’s journey is not about a singer developing her talent — that’s already there. It is about finding her way toward an aesthetic once she has the world’s attention. She dyes her hair Tang orange, begins working with a choreographer and sings springy pop songs about butts, all of which she does without wavering, even when Jackson drunkenly criticizes her for being inauthentic. Some viewers may read a rock-versus-pop hierarchy into Ally’s transformations — that she is more “real” when she is harmonizing with Jackson’s twangy melodies or sitting at her piano — but Gaga’s onscreen mastery over both genres is a pre-emptive rebuttal to what is essentially a gendered bias. What “A Star Is Born” makes clear about Lady Gaga is that she possesses the dexterity to make whatever kind of music she likes. Cooper told me that he cast Gaga after seeing her perform “La Vie en Rose” at a cancer benefit. The very next day, he drove to her Malibu home to test their chemistry. They bonded right away about their families (both East Coast, both Italian) and ate spaghetti on her porch. “She was completely illuminated by the sun,” he said. “So charismatic. I thought inside my head, Oh, gosh. If she is like this on film, if that’s the worst case scenario that she’s this present on film, the movie will work.” It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when Lady Gaga, the international superstar, was born. Past a certain level of fame, the origin stories of pop artists begin to tilt into the mythological. “I have a nerve inside of me to do this,” Gaga said, sitting on a swivel chair in her basement studio, when I asked what drives her. She kept her legs crossed at the ankles and her spine rod-straight, with her shell-pink nails gingerly intertwined in her lap, as if she were practicing to meet Queen Elizabeth (side note: When Gaga did meet the queen, after performing in the Royal Variety Show in 2009, she curtsied while wearing a floor-length, puff-sleeved dress made entirely of slick red latex). “And I have no idea where it comes from, except that it might come from God. No one knows.” What she does know is that at some point, she felt free: to drop her birth name (Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta), to turn herself into an event, to keep shedding old skins. Lady Gaga’s early career was a study in this invitational freedom: Look how free I am, look how free you could be. This is what she was selling, at 21, with her platinum oversize hairbows and gigantic sunglasses and skyscraper shoulder pads. This is the realization that led her, after growing up on the Upper West Side, attending a private Catholic girls’ school and studying piano minuets, to move downtown in 2004, first to study theater arts at N.Y.U. (she dropped out during sophomore year) and then to sing in grungy bars on the Lower East Side while she sent her demos to record labels. She read Andy Warhol’s books and realized that what most people want, when they dream of fame, is not necessarily wealth or power but limitlessness: the ability to change. So many artists start out gritty and homegrown but calcify into hardened personae over time; when Lady Gaga adopted her new name (sometime around 2006, most likely from a Queen song), she decided to flip the formula. What if she began with the character, and the character was the physical embodiment of flux? What if she never wore the same outfit twice, or gave an interview out of costume, or claimed to be a paragon of creative authenticity? Gaga’s debut album, “The Fame” (quickly reissued with extra songs as “The Fame Monster”), came out in August 2008, a season of optimism and political overhaul, when young people were ready to accept jangly pop hooks from a chimerical sprite who told them they could continually redefine themselves. Her first recordings may not have been too deep — “Poker Face,” still her second-biggest single to date, after “Just Dance,” is an ode to mirrored surfaces, to remaining willfully inscrutable — but they were catchy (she changed the way an entire generation hears the phrase “ooh la la”), and their agile lightness was intentional. Much of her early music was thumping and linear: big synths, big hooks, the beats clinking together like a wristful of silver bangles. The music was a tool for propagating her radiant image, which was continually surprising to behold. She insists the performance is the reality. When Gaga first emerged onto the pop scene, she was a phenomenon — a kooky amalgam of New York club-kid toughness, art-school experimentation, record-label grooming, classical vocal training and bona fide radio hits. She clearly took her cues from previous incarnations of major pop stardom (David Bowie’s amphibious glam, Madonna’s blond ambition, Michael Jackson’s dual love of sparkles and precision), but she was even more focused than her predecessors on the live event, on the coup de théâtre. She started pushing boundaries and stopped wearing pants; she became a walking billboard for avant-garde fashion (Alexander McQueen’s ankle-bending hoof heels, a jacket covered in felt Kermit the Frogs, several gowns made of human hair, that meat dress), a fact that served to make every other artist at the time who wasn’t rolling around onstage in a pool of fake blood seem, frankly, dull. Gaga’s initial obsession with masquerade predicted the double lives we all live now, our simultaneous existences as living, breathing people and disembodied avatars. But instead of seeing those identities as segmented — the real person, the facade — she put forth the concept that it’s possible, and ultimately adaptive, in a fractured world to try to free yourself from old boundaries. You can be an insider and an outsider at the same time, a human and an alien. All that is solid melts into Gaga. If this seems paradoxical, it is; but the paradox is where Gaga shines. Postmodern double truths are her milieu. She started calling herself a monster, not just to embrace a kind of outré bizarreness that had mainly been the province of male pop icons like Bowie or Prince, but also because she was monstrous, a pop creation that devoured the zeitgeist and then gleefully regurgitated it. She mock-hanged herself with a noose onstage, she dreamed up a hat filled with live cockroaches, she sucked on a rosary in the “Alejandro” video, she hired a “vomit artist” to spew lime-green milk on her outfit at South by Southwest, she delivered an awards-show speech as her male alter-ego, Jo Calderone. Her whole project was a Technicolor dream ballet, a gauzy hallucination. And it sold records (over 27 million, worldwide) and won awards (six Grammys). “I do keep transforming into a new shell of me,” she told me. “So sure, there is an acting component to what I do, or a showbiz component to what I do. But the word ‘acting,’ it’s hard for me to talk about in that way, because ‘acting’ to me almost implies faking it.” She insisted to me that all her iterations form an unbroken line, that the performance is the reality. Gaga has, over the last decade, arguably moved the entire pop apparatus toward forceful weirdness. Her influence is everywhere — she opened the doors for more female hitmakers to be cheekily bizarre (Miley Cyrus grinding on a wrecking ball, Katy Perry with her sniper-rifle bra filled with whipped cream, Sia living under her wig, even St. Vincent’s indie Fritz Lang affect) — but as a result, Gaga’s early maximalism began to feel less vital to the cultural conversation. In 2011, Adele’s “21” cemented a new austerity in pop; all she had to do to sell 11 million records was stand in one place and sing plaintively about heartbreak. So Gaga swerved again, and again, and again. She made a jazz record with Tony Bennett. She made a crunchier, heavy-metallish album called “Artpop” that mostly failed to connect with the public, at least on the large Gagagian scale she was used to (it sold fewer than a million copies). When she turned 30, she released a more minimalist fifth record called “Joanne,” after an aunt who died young of complications from lupus. She promoted the album in ripped T-shirts and a plain, pink felt hat. She toured dive bars before the arenas. She also released the Netflix documentary “Gaga: Five Foot Two,” a vérité glimpse into her daily life as she prepped for the 2017 Super Bowl, produced and promoted “Joanne” and spoke openly about the debilitating pain caused by her fibromyalgia (something she had been dealing with privately for years). The documentary presents Gaga with a striking lack of vanity. She appears on camera with dirty hair and a bare face. This is Gaga the Vulnerable, Gaga the Sensitive Soul. That film ends with her performance at the Super Bowl, where she sang all the karaoke staples of her back catalog — “Bad Romance,” “Telephone,” even “Just Dance” — with gusto in a sequined bodysuit, thrusting through the jangly disco beats of “Born This Way” in high-heel boots, surrounded by an army of dancers in iridescent capes. It was a blistering set, a Greatest Hits Cardio Workout and a truly impressive display of her cultural dominance. But it also felt elegiac, as if it belonged to a different era, when Gaga was giving stump speeches about overturning “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the song became an anthem of the fight for gay marriage on a national scale. In recent years, queer culture has become more anti-institutional, less about normalizing and more about resisting norms. In a way, Gaga’s galactic fame, which once gave her such a huge platform as an advocate for equality, became a liability when the conversation became more intimate and nuanced. Pop is not entirely post-spectacle (Beyoncé’s recent Coachella performance was a multiact extravaganza), but it is evolving into a less bombastic space. It is getting more raw, smaller. And Gaga is doing the same. She has not given up on the power of an audacious live show (this winter, she will put on a pyrotechnic Las Vegas residency called “Enigma”), but in making “A Star Is Born,” she is entering into a softer conversation with the public — about talent, about ambition, about her own trajectory. Ally is the most human of all of Gaga’s creations, and offering her to us — her fear, her loyalty, her shattered heart after tragedy — is a different kind of gamble than stepping out in front of millions dressed like a holographic Muppet. She is, in essence, making exploratory autofiction on a grand scale, even as she is playing yet another character. Lady Gaga bought Frank Zappa’s eccentric woodland estate not as a place to live while in Los Angeles — she already has a Mediterranean-style villa on an isolated, craggy cliffside in Malibu for that — but as a work retreat, the new nerve center of her countless creative pursuits. She wants to paint here, write music here (she told me that currently she is feverishly writing songs on a white piano upstairs; literally on the surface of the piano, with a black Sharpie) and plan her Vegas spectacular from here with her production team, like a war council plotting some dazzling siege. In her recording studio, after her “Shallows” serenade, Gaga played me five tracks from the coming film soundtrack. As the music blasted, she began to loosen up — this was her turf, her major contribution to the film. She lip-synced to her own songs from her swivel chair, looking straight into my eyes and drawing me insistently into her joy. The studio is her sanctuary, and one of the main reasons she felt she had to have the property. She is also working to preserve as many of the home’s oddities as possible: the vintage submarine doors with thick portholes, a giant dragon mural, the library floor painted to look like a lily pond. She told me she loves the house’s “intricate chaos.” Gaga is an auction shopper — she likes to acquire iconic objects, created by iconic personalities — and as I toured Zappa’s house it occurred to me that we were standing in a giant collector’s item of sorts, an 8,000-square-foot twig in the magpie’s nest of pop cultural artifacts that she has been building for a decade. In 2012, she purchased 55 items from Michael Jackson’s private archive, including his leather “Bad” jacket and a crystal glove. That same year, she bought an eggshell silk Alexander McQueen gown from the collection of the British fashion maven Daphne Guinness. In 2016, for her Dive Bar Tour in support of “Joanne,” Gaga rolled up to a show in Elvis’s pink 1955 Cadillac Fleetwood (she was just borrowing it). Perhaps this collector’s impulse is what she absorbed from her early study of Warhol. Gaga is an artist of accrual, of remixing and reimagination, of pulling her heroes into her gravitational orbit. She once told an interviewer that her “whole career is a tribute to David Bowie,” but her career is really a tribute to all the different ways a person can be monstrously famous: She wants to wear every costume, live out every type of stardom to its maximalist extreme. If she was going to be a movie star, she couldn’t just step into a role, or a film, that no one had ever heard of — she wanted to waltz into a lineage. When she was younger, she told me, she used to watch “The Wizard of Oz,” over and over, convinced that Judy Garland was the greatest entertainer alive. “Judy, I just think she’s tremendous,” she told me. “There’s a vulnerability behind her eyes, the way she speaks, she has big features. I just always wanted to be like her. It’s as simple as that.” And now she is standing on the very same stage. Earlier in the afternoon, she showed me a room that was empty save for a gigantic photograph of her own face, at least 15 feet across, in a gilded frame. “It was a gift from Bradley,” she said. “It’s the last frame of the movie. Do you know the scene?” I did know it. It is the moment when Ally is standing on the stage of the Shrine Auditorium — where Garland shot her final scene — in an ice blue evening gown, singing a homage to her late husband. She starts out timid and drained of expression, explaining to the audience that she is going to sing the last song that Jackson wrote for her, and that maybe with their support, she can get through it. But as the ballad goes on, her voice swells and becomes an avalanche. It’s a bravura performance in extreme close-up, a sort of symphonic summoning of every woman who has played the part. Gaga channels both the way Garland sang (wounded, tonally bright, barely holding it together) and the way Streisand did (forceful, sweeping, with a diffident jutting of the jaw). But Gaga adds something of her own: a sensual, earthy confidence, like gasoline in her veins. When she finishes, a single elephant tear rolls down her face. Magically, the moment somehow avoids bathos — the tear feels truly earned. After watching her perform this scene, I felt elated by what Gaga managed to do, not just for her character but for herself. You desperately want to know what her future holds after the curtain falls. I asked Gaga later what we can expect from her next phase. Of course, there’s Vegas and a new record on the way, and she’s reading piles of scripts. But she really didn’t want to discuss any of that. Instead, she just smiled enigmatically. “Oh,” she sighed. “I’m just shape-shifting again.” This article originally appeared here.

"The following review contains spoilers" “I want you to look right in my eyes
 To tell me you love me, to be by my side..." It seems like a simple request: To have someone look at you and see you for who you truly are. Having someone like what they see – and want to stay – isn’t as easy. On the surface, A Star Is Born may be a film about the rise of Ally’s (Lady Gaga) career, and the demise of Jackson Maine’s (Bradley Cooper), but beyond ‘the shallow it is about their complicated and unyielding love for each other. From their very first encounter, we can feel the beating hearts of both characters on screen. One of my favorite moments in the entire film is when Jackson comes backstage to meet Ally after her performance at the drag bar. Jackson asks if he can take off one of Ally’s taped eyebrows. He is so gentle when he peels off the thin black piece of tape, and when he looks at her, it is a look of admiration, never judgement. As both the actors and characters, Gaga and Bradley never have an ounce of judgement toward each other. They share an electric and singular chemistry that is difficult to fabricate. Of course, not all relationships are perfect. Jackson’s alcoholism and drug abuse is the ticking time bomb of their union. Ally is very patient and at one point she even says, “It’s not your fault. This is a disease.” However, as much as she wants him to be alright, it isn’t her choice. Jackson was already deteriorating before he met her, and continues to do so even if she gives him the best years of his life. Bradley Cooper is at his best. With a single glance, we can see when he is sober and when he is wasted. Beyond the slurred speech, and stumbling, his eyes radiate years of pain and, when he’s looking at Gaga, glimmers of hope. As Ally, Lady Gaga is a selfless actress and focuses on intently listening to Bradley and empathizing with his character, never once shying away from trying to alleviate his pain. It is no secret that Lady Gaga and Ally are quite similar: Italian American aspiring singer- songwriters who are given an opportunity to succeed if they conform to the music industry. This role was familiar territory for Gaga, but that’s what would make it all the more challenging. Nobody likes confronting their fears or vulnerabilities, but A Star Is Born forces Gaga to hold up a mirror to herself and deal with the aspects of her life and career that scare her the most. The most difficult part about acting is being believable – being human. Lady Gaga has proven herself to be a natural by unapologetically revealing her humanity on screen without trying to hide behind wigs, costumes, or even music. Every lyric she has written, and every note she sings, only elevates her authenticity and thus our compassion for Ally. The songs in the film are truly of musical theatre standard. A song comes when words are not enough to convey emotion. Bradley and Gaga may not be breaking into song, but the film’s music is a heightened language for the two of them to communicate their love for each other. In the final scene of the movie, Ally sings a song that Jackson wrote for her: “I’ll Never Love Again.” It is one of the most beautiful songs in the film. Back to her natural hair, stripped of the pop facade she created, she pays tribute to Jackson. She may have lost the great love of her life, but he helped her fall in love with herself. Jackson helped her believe in herself and gave her the push she needed to chase her dreams. The great love story of A Star Is Born is actually the one Ally has with herself. Through Jackson’s love for her, Ally finds who she is as an artist and the belief that she’s worthy to succeed. Sometimes it only takes one person to believe in us, as Lady Gaga says of her director and on screen partner Bradley Cooper, but you have to be willing to agree with them. Bradley and Gaga are exceptional as actors and musicians and leave you wanting to experience the journey of their love story over and over again. This is a true marker of the beginning of Lady Gaga’s career as an actress, and what an explosive way to start. - Marc Cohen

Lady Gaga joined her fellow co-star Bradley Cooper on The Graham Norton Show. The magic duo sat next to Oscar winning Ryan Gosling and Doctor-Who Jodie Whittaker to answered funny questions, play strange instruments and talk about their upcoming movie A Star is Born. You can watch the full episode below. This video can only be played using your Browser not Twitter or Facebook. (remember to close all adds)

Lady Gaga finally returned to Ellen after five years since her last appearance. She discussed about her upcoming movie with Bradley Cooper 'A Star is Born' and played some funny games. You can watch the episode below.

Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper will arrive in Leicester Square to join the Premiere of their upcoming movie 'A Star is Born' in London tonight. You can watch the event LIVE below.

We can exclusively reveal that Lady Gaga will release Shallow along with a MUSIC VIDEO tomorrow! The song is the main theme of her upcoming movie with Bradley Cooper 'A Star is Born', out next week. You can find the timetable below, just click on it and make sure to pre-order the soundtrack here and you will get Shallow tomorrow! Here's a preview of Shallow (acoustic version).

Lady Gaga is about to walk the red carpet of her movie premiere 'A Star is Born' in Los Angeles! Watch the live stream below.

He's become a father in the last year, she has a love story of her own, but there’s a connection between them. The actor made his directorial debut while the singer changed her hair color and became a movie actress. And together they gave music life (again) in A Star is Born. Lady Gaga has a theory. She says that when someone thinks for too long how to express themselves through another platform than the one they usually use, then that person becomes a "Petri dish". A Petri dish is a container used in biology to make things grow: Lady Gaga explained this to me, because I had never heard of it before. Anyway. Gaga says that talent lives on the dish like a seed, it grows more and more until it becomes a vortex and explodes in all its strength. This metaphor can be applied to Bradley Cooper but even to herself. Because in this movie, A Star is Born, Gaga acts like she has done it for ages. Lady Gaga as an actress was waiting on the Petri dish, just like there was Bradley Copper as a singer and director on it. Together they revitalised a script that is as classic as a jazz song and has made it to Hollywood three times already. A Star Is Born is the story about a girl becoming famous in the industry while a man goes through a downfall between alcohol and the end of his career, it’s the perfect metaphor of Hollywood and the absence of Fame as a disease and the presence of it as something that won’t last. This version of the movie, which clearly recalls the one with Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Streisand (even with some identical lines), debuted at the Mostra of Cinema di Venezia, and it will come out on October 11 (in Italy) and will probably dominate the topics, box offices and the main awards of the next months. Gaga and Bradley are here in front of me like 'modest' personified, even if she’s wearing jewellery like a Queen. He has a shirt and blue jeans, she has a black dress, high chignon and they both look like they are waiting, waiting for everything to be fine. The alchemy between these two sparkles on the screen just like on this interview. They listen to each others answers, like a rhythm, just like when they sing in the movie. I make a joke, quoting Lady Gaga’s song The Edge of Glory, and she challenges him "did you get it?", he replies quickly saying that he got it, and that he knows all her songs. "He’s so good, isn’t he?" She says, and they both laugh. Almost like two kids. She describes him "as focused as a laser". Bradley replies "She’s the most talented, respected by all kind of artists that I know, from the country singers to the heavy metal guitarists". If this friendship sounds fake, then they both deserve two Oscars each, not one. Because beyond the promotional aspect, these two aren’t here without a reason. Both of them, fought their demons (Bradley's alcoholism and Gaga's mental and physical issues), and thanks to discipline and talent, they are both here, winning in everything. The last two versions of "A Star is Born", the one with Judy Garland in 1954 and the one with Barbara Streisand in 1976 were both made to re launch the career of the main actresses. Barbra Streisand for example, who was selling millions of records and already had an Oscar back then, was looking for something to expand her career to the young public. The idea of A Star is Born moving to the world of pop/rock (made possible by the writers Joan Didion and John Greogry Dune) sounded perfect. And it was. Despite negative reviews from critics, the previous remake of the movie earned a lot of success and 'Evergreen' won an Oscar. This 2018 version of A Star is Born, isn’t a comeback move. Lady Gaga is at the top of the her career as a singer. Ten years ago her first single Just Dance came out. Today she is 32 years old and she can do whatever she likes, even nothing. But instead, she agreed on Cooper’s offer, while he agreed to direct the movie on his own, which was originally planned for Clint Eastwood and Beyoncé. Bradley and Gaga met for the first time backstage of Saturday Night Live. "She had to sing, and I had a little sketch, we talked for few seconds". Says Cooper. "I recently saw a picture of that day. I wouldn’t believe that such a special bond between us could be born". They aren't a couple in real life of course: Cooper lives with the super model Irina Shayk, who last year gave birth to their daughter Lea, and Gaga is engaged to Christian Carino. "Our is a story of admiration and friendship" explains Bradley. "Everything was born during a charity night at Sean Parkers’s house (Facebook co-founder). Gaga sang La Vie en Rose on the piano leaving me breathless." In the movie, you can actually experience this scene. The two main characters meet when Jack (Cooper's character) goes to a drag bar and starts watching Ally (Gaga's character), a waitress by day and singer at night, singing La Vie En Rose. In A Star is Born, Lady Gaga isn’t blonde, she doesn’t wear make up, and she isn’t wearing strange outfits. "It was a real challenge for me to go like this", she says. "I felt vulnerable without my looks, but I jumped in, just like a dive in cold water. There is so much about me in this story that Bradley wanted to show. Just like Ally says in the movie, I was used to going in a room full of men that kept saying they love my voice, and how I wrote my songs, but they would give them to other singers because they were prettier than me". So, when did she notice that a star was born in her career? "I was touring in America doing small shows in clubs, even three shows every day. And then, near the end of the tour in Canada, the speaker began playing Just Dance, and I started crying", Gaga said. "Wow" adds Bradley. Which tells us about his "A Star is Born" moment. "I Was in Miami, and they hired me for a tv ad for Wendy’s which never aired, and I was staying in hotel that looked very luxurious (but it wasn’t really), and I called my dad just to tell him that I was on a room with a balcony." Three Oscar nominations later, he became a director, just like many other actors, from Redford to Warren Betty to Clint Eastwood who choose to take another path for their career. In 2019 he will play in another very anticipated movie: they biopic on the Orchestral director Leonard Bernstein, produced by Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. "I always wanted to direct. This was my ultimate dream." He explains. "I became an actor first just because I was afraid of something so hard". Now he found the courage. He learned to play and sing and he even wrote some songs for the movie. "That’s all thanks to Gaga. She trusted me, she believed in me". He watches her in the eyes with gratitude. They tell me about when Barbra Streisand came on set one day. Like a blessing. And how some scenes were recorded during a Kris Kristofferson show. Their dream has become reality. Before leaving, I ask both of them if they are afraid of performing in front of the public. "Just if I’m not prepared", replies Bradley. And Gaga: "Me, even if I’m always ready, I’m always nervous. Tony Bennett once told me that it’s ok to feel like this: if you are afraid it means that you care. Sometimes I shake backstage. Then I walk up the stairs, they the spotlights turn on, and everything goes away". Gaga starts clicking her fingers, because she feels like she wants to dance, right here, right now. Translation by Lady Gaga Now.