For the last time, Lady Gaga is not dating Bradley Cooper.
No matter how authentic their chemistry seemed in ‘A Star Is Born’ or how steamy their duet of the film’s hit track ‘Shallow’ played at the Oscars, Gaga assured Oprah Winfrey in an interview that any romance speculation in the media is “very silly.”
“I mean, we made a love story,” the ‘Bad Romance’ hit maker told Winfrey for an Elle story. “As a performer and as an actress, of course we wanted people to believe that we were in love. And we wanted people to feel that love at the Oscars.
“We wanted it to go right through the lens of that camera and to every television that it was being watched on,” she added. “And we worked hard on it, we worked for days. We mapped the whole thing out — it was orchestrated as a performance.”
Despite it supposedly being a calculated charade, the immediate fervour that followed the pair’s PDA-ridden performance was not lost on the co-stars, who, according to Gaga, later swapped some platonic pats on the back for successfully executing their trick.
“In truth, when we talked about it, we went, ‘Well, I guess we did a good job!’” she joked.
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This isn’t the first time Gaga has been forced to address gossip surrounding her close relationship with Cooper. Soon after the Oscars telecast, she similarly debunked the conspiracy theories on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live.’
The conversation with Winfrey surrounding Cooper’s acclaimed directorial debut, which ended up winning an Oscar for ‘Shallow,’ then turned more serious when discussing Gaga’s layered approach to her leading role as Ally, who struggles to cope with her lover’s alcoholism after he turns her into an overnight sensation. For the veteran performer, the story’s motifs of trauma and recovery hit close to home.
“I was raped when I was 19 years old, repeatedly,” Gaga said. “I have been traumatised in a variety of ways by my career over the years from many different things, but I survived, and I’ve kept going. And when I looked at that Oscar, I saw pain.”
In her famously therapeutic style, Winfrey encouraged the singer to reflect further on how her past experiences with sexual assault have shaped her, which prompted a candid response from Gaga about the battle she continues to fight.
“I have PTSD. I have chronic pain. Neuropathic pain trauma response is a weekly part of my life. I’m on medication; I have several doctors,” Gaga said. “This is how I survive.”
After wrapping her long-running Las Vegas residency next spring, the triple-threat is set to dive back into the movie industry, teaming up with ‘Alien’ director Ridley Scott for a new film about the Gucci family and murder of the grandson of fashion empire founder Guccio Gucci.
