Lady Gaga Discusses Her Oscar, Self Harm, And Those Bradley Cooper Rumors
Lady Gaga sat down with Oprah Winfrey for Elle Magazine and discussed her career path and mental health.
When Oprah asks Gaga about the past ten years of her career, she opens up about her responsibility to humanity. “I really view my career, and even what I’m doing now, as a rebellion against all the things in the world that I see to be unkind. Kindness heals the world. Kindness heals people. It’s what brings us together—it’s what keeps us healthy.” She adds, “I recognized very early on that my impact was to help liberate people through kindness. I mean, I think it’s the most powerful thing in the world.”
Lady Gaga also shares some surprising details about her mental health. She explains to Oprah, “I was a cutter for a long time, and the only way that I was able to stop cutting and self-harming myself was to realize that what I was doing was trying to show people that I was in pain instead of telling them and asking for help.”
She also says, ” I was in physical, mental, and emotional pain. And medicine works, but you need medicine with the therapy for it to really work, because there’s a part that you have to do yourself.”
Gaga also gets candid about playing Ally in A Star Is Born. She explains that she lived as the character and it took awhile for that feeling to go away. She also explains that looking at the Oscar wasn’t a positive experience and that she once said when asked about it: “I see a lot of pain.”
She goes into more detail, saying, “And I wasn’t lying in that moment. I was raped when I was 19 years-old, repeatedly. I have been traumatized 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. I don’t know that anyone understood it when I said it in the room, but I understood it.”
During the interview, Oprah asks about her and Bradley Cooper. “I think the press is very silly. I mean, we made a love story. For me, 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. And we worked hard on it, we worked for days. We mapped the whole thing out—it was orchestrated as a performance.”
She also adds, “In truth, when we talked about it, we went, ‘Well, I guess we did a good job!'”
