No one does it quite like Lady Gaga, as the queen of reinvention her colourful costumes have seen her erupt out of an egg at the Grammys in 2011 to taking on an entirely new form to play her male alter ego Jo Calderone.
But when you strip away her many different looks – from her leotard and hair bow when she first burst onto the scene in 2008 to her meat dress at the 2010 MTV VMAs – what lies beneath her many characters is a girl like any other, with as many vulnerabilities as the rest of us with her biggest battle being her fame.
The 30-year-old singer says: “I want the people that I know and that I love to love the real me, not the idea of me that they think they know. This has probably been one of my biggest struggles as a human being is that somebody can say to me, maybe I could know them for a year, and they could say to me, Gaga, ‘I love you’.
“But I know there’s still kind of this veneer in front of me and a wall, and that maybe they say they love me but they’ve yet to see beyond the hair and the make-up. Even if I’ve take it all off and show them, there’s still this really famous person standing in front of them and they just can’t see beyond it. I desperately so want for you all to love the real me and not the idea they have of me.”
While Lady Gaga – real name Stefani Germanotta – may have found global fame thanks to her incredible singing career, she’s no one trick pony and stars in a breakout role in the fifth season of gory US anthology series, American Horror Story: Hotel.
But starring alongside Oscar winner Kathy Bates and turning to acting left the star a bag of nerves and she isn’t afraid to say just how bad her jitters were on the first day of filming.
She says: “I threw up on the way here [to filming] in a Ziploc bag in my Rolls Royce. I don’t know why I thought that was funny, but I thought it was funny, and I saved it and I brought it to [the show producer] Ryan Murphy and he was like, ‘Oh, you think you can disgust me? You can’t!’ I was completely nervous. I’m just really praying I don’t f**k this up. It’s very nerve wracking.”
Playing The Countess – a psychopath who raises vampire children – was a learning curve even for Lady Gaga and she admits it was hard for her to play someone so evil.
She says: “I have spent a lot of time studying Anthony Perkins from Psycho, Anthony Hopkins from Silence of the Lambs, I’ve spent a lot of time watching The Jinx and Robert Durst’s character as he’s a rich, serial killer similar to The Countess in a way. I’m extremely dramatic and funny. Her and I are very different. It was so hard for me to be mean all the time. I found a real freedom in her because I'd like to be able, as an actress, to just be my true self.”
So with such a passion for her performance in the hit show, will she be pursuing a career in Hollywood?
She says: “If I were ever to make a move in television or as an actress that it would never feel like a move. That nobody would ever go, Oh here she is, trying to become an actress and put out a clothing line and a record label and that’s what everyone expects, that it’s time for my empire – I don’t give a f**k about that. That is completely unfulfilling to me; it does nothing for my soul. What I did want was to be taken seriously as an actress.”
American Horror Story: Hotel is available on Digital HD now and on Blu-ray™ and DVD from 3rd October, from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment
