Lady Gaga’s barefaced avatar for her debut leading movie role
Lady Gaga, the pop singer rarely seen without strikingly coiffed hair and heavy makeup, said on Friday that she had to go natural for her first starring role in a movie.
Gaga plays a girl-next-door character who achieves her dream of becoming a famous singer in A Star Is Born, directed by co-star Bradley Cooper. “He wanted to see me with nothing,” Gaga told a news conference ahead of the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
“I walked down the stairs of my house before we filmed the screentest for A Star Is Born, and he had a makeup wipe in his hand and he put his hand on my face and he went like this,” she said, miming Cooper rubbing her face. “There was makeup, just a little bit, and he said: ‘I want no makeup on your face’. And so this vulnerability was something he brought out of me,” he shared.
In the movie, which is a remake of the 1937 film of the same name, Gaga’s character, Ally, is told her nose is too big and will prevent her becoming a success, something the 32year-old singer said she empathised with. “When I was first starting out I was not the most beautiful girl in the room,” she said, adding that her faith in her own songwriting talent allowed her to forge ahead.
“There were lots of women that were singers but did not write their own music. Many record execs wanted to take my songs and give them to other women to sing, and I was, like, holding on to my music with my whole 10 fingers, saying: ‘You’re not going to take my songs from me’.”
Gaga earlier won a Golden Globe in 2016 for her role in the TV series American Horror Story: Hotel. REUTERS