The extreme (and incredibly gross) lengths Lady Gaga has gone to for her first acting gig

November 13, 20154:53pm

Lady Gaga has taken her role in American Horror Story: Hotel incredibly seriously. Picture: Suzanne Tenner/FX

LADY Gaga is not exactly subtle, and it’s hard to imagine her being nervous.

But when she was driving to her first meeting with American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy, she confesses that she was overcome with nerves, and did something disgusting.
“I threw up on the way in a Ziploc bag in my Rolls Royce, and I saved it and brought it for Ryan Murphy,” reveals Gaga when we meet on the back lot of American Horror Story: Hotel at Fox Studios in Los Angeles, her driver parked outside, nonchalantly eating lunch in that same Rolls.
In Gaga’s first gig as an actress, Murphy had created the role of a bloodthirsty sexual predator known as The Countess. She would be performing alongside veteran actresses like Kathy Bates and Angela Bassett. The thought of this new challenge sickened her to the stomach.

“Ryan was like, ‘Oh you think you can disgust me? You can’t.’ You think you can’t get anything past him but then he met me. And I’ll bring him a bag of my own vomit to the set and I’ll just say ‘I did this in the car, I’m so nervous’,” she told news.com.au.

Some of Lady Gaga’s nerves came from playing against film legend Kathy Bates. Picture: Prashant Gupta/FXSource:Supplied

“It was great even though I was completely nervous. One of the kids had lice, the first day, so they had to shut down the set,” she says, involuntarily scratching her head at the memory. “It was my first scene. So I was talking to the kid and it’s like a 40-year-old woman on her knees with a blonde wig on pretending to be the kid and I’m just like ‘I’ve never done this before!’ The camera’s on me and Ryan Murphy’s screaming, and I’m just really praying I don’t f*** this up. It was very nerve wracking.”
Gaga, otherwise known as Stefani Germanotta, 29, immediately set about breaking the ice with her new cast, throwing a lavish party at her Beverly Hills mansion which, according to co-star Chloe Sevigny, was “so wonderfully excessive, laid out for about 200 people when there was really only 20 of us. She even dyed her pool red to look like blood”.
On another occasion, sensitive to co-star Angela Bassett’s anxiety over an upcoming sex scene between the two women, Gaga presented the actress with an enormous cake depicting their sex scene in marzipan and frosting.
“It’s her performing a sexual act on my person. I didn’t eat any I was so shocked,” says the actor, later producing her phone to show a photograph of the confection featuring a marzipan Basset lying on her back while Gaga, resplendent in sunglasses, is crouched between her legs.
“I took it home and hid it in the garage refrigerator because I have young kids who I hope haven’t seen it,” says Bassett, who plays Ramona Royale on the show.

Angela Bassett, who plays Ramona Royale in the show, was clearly not cool with the graphic lesbian sex cake.Source:Supplied

Seven episodes into the series, which is still being shot, Gaga is slightly bemused by fans’ reaction to her chilly portrayal.
“I find it very funny that people wonder if that’s just the way that I really am, that it was very easy for me to just kind of walk in here with my blonde hair on and just be a bitch and be rude to everyone and that’s just what I do because you’ve seen me do something like that before, when the truth is that it’s actually very challenging to be sincere when you have all of that on. It’s not comfortable, it’s never been comfortable for me but the idea is to make it look effortless,” she says.
“To be honest I have spent a lot of time studying Anthony Perkins from Psycho, Anthony Hopkins from Silence of the Lambs and Robert Durst’s character in The Jinx, as he’s a rich serial [killer] character similar to The Countess in a way, with this sort of practical approach. If you know me in real life, I’m extremely dramatic and funny, laughing, joking with my friends — and so The Countess and I are very different. It was hard for me to be mean all the time. Ryan would be like ‘Be more of a bitch,’ or ‘be meaner’. It was something I really had to work on.”
The role, she says, even created problems at home with her fiancee, TV’s Chicago Fire actor Taylor Kinney.

Gaga says she has trouble getting out of character. Picture: InstagramSource:Supplied

“When I am here, I am The Countess and actually when I leave here, right now I’m The Countess and it’s quite a challenge for Taylor at times because I just don’t give a f*** about s*** anymore. She’s been alive for 100 years so no matter what goes on in her hotel, if she loses her cool, she can’t handle her s***. In my normal life on a day-to-day basis, I’m a really kind and compassionate person naturally but when I leave the set and I go home and someone says to me, ‘Can you help me with this?’ and I’m just …” she says, throwing up her hands in an “I don’t give a damn” gesture.
“So this is a dangerous profession but I think it’s just the way that it is and I’ve committed to myself that I’m willing to fight for this part of my life. And I think that some actors live that way and I actually quite like playing a killer,” she says, smiling as she twists her diamond engagement ring on a pale hand bearing ruthless, long, pointed black nails.
“It is dangerous to be an actor. Period. I don’t know if it’s more dangerous for me than it is for anyone else. I think when you decide that you want to commit to it, it will take you there if you ask for it. I would be lying if I didn’t say that every day that I’m here, whatever I’m shooting, its 100 per cent mirrored in my real personal life, every single time. ”
If Gaga seems effortless in her role, then she prepared hard for her TV debut. “You better believe I prepared my arse off to come in with these fantastically talented actors. All I have is my preparation time, and Jesus, really to save me from possibly screwing this up. I have a scene with Kathy Bates after this and I was up all night with this script, jotting notes, looking at it and figuring it out because that’s all I have when I get in there — my discipline, and that’s the thing I’ve learnt over the past couple of years is probably my biggest strength in all of this, is that I actually am very disciplined.
“I love being an artist, I love being a student so I read my lines. I spend a lot of time thinking like her. When I go out, if I’m walking alone down the street, which is very rare, or if I’m out at a restaurant or in the car and we’re driving past people and I’ll look at them and go ‘Jeez, I wonder if you’re clean? I wonder if I were to kill you, would it be worth it for me?’ So I just have to start thinking like that constantly in order for it to feel real when I’m in here otherwise you risk just being the campy blonde or the bitch with the outfit on.
“Quite frankly I think you could put a number of women in this role, and it would be fantastic. It’s a great role so it’s what can I bring to this role that’s special that no-one else can bring?”
As much as she argues she is unlike her TV alter-ego, she acknowledges some similarities. “I suppose that my objective in life is the same as The Countess’ even though we are very different in character. The Countess has two objectives. She wants to be celebrated, and if you’re not celebrating me you’ve gotta go. My second objective, which is similar, is that I want to be celebrated for my art. I want the people that I know and 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. I could know someone for a year and see them every day and they could say to me ‘God, I love you’, but I know there’s still maybe this veneer in front of me, or a wall, and if even if they say that they love me that maybe they’ve yet to see beyond the hair and the make-up, even if I’ve taken it all off and shown them, but there’s still this really famous person standing in front of them and they just can’t see beyond the fame.
“And I so desperately want for you all to love the real me, and not the idea of me that you write about or see. So The Countess is similar. She wants everyone in this hotel to love her for who she really is, cunning and evil or not. She feels that they are all here in this triumph of the hotel because of her and she keeps them together and she wants to be rewarded for who she truly is and not for anything else.”
One of the boldest performers on the planet, fearlessly performing her songs before millions of audiences around the globe, Gaga admits it’s almost impossible to watch herself on the small screen.
“Are you kidding me? I can’t f***ing breath when I’m watching myself. Literally my stomach hurts, I need to hide.
“Sometimes I’m interested and I like when I can watch it and then other times, I’m just going ‘Why did they use that take?’ ‘Didn’t I do it this way?’ When I watch myself, I’m thinking constantly about how I can make myself better. I’m never having a glass of champagne, patting myself on the back.”

No this is not Lady Gaga vomiting, it’s her singing. But still, gross to imagine. Picture: Jason Merritt/Getty Images for