Clay Enos / Warner Bros PicturesAfter months of hype, Lady Gaga‘s big-screen debut A Star Is Born finally opens today. While you might think it’s not much of a stretch for Gaga to play a singer who rises to the top of the music biz, she insists that Ally, her character, is absolutely nothing like her.
“Ally’s completely different from me,” she explains. “When I decided I was going to…try to make it as a musician and as a singer, I was so confident, and I was banging down every door trying to get a gig.”
“I felt like a star already because I had a collective group of artists around me and a culture,” Gaga adds. “This is not the case for Ally. Ally’s completely given up on herself.”
And in real life, Gaga sure doesn’t look like Ally, an unglamorous brunette. But Gaga says that helped her relate to Ally’s situation.
“I dyed my hair and took my makeup off quite a bit before we started filming,” she explains. “I enjoyed the anonymity, because no one would recognize me when I would go out…it kinda put me in that space of where Ally would be.”
There was one scene in the movie, however, where Gaga was able to find a parallel between herself and Ally.
“Since the beginning of my career, it’s been all about not letting other people tell you who you are or what you’re supposed to be,” Gaga says. “And you see that with Ally. At one point, she meets this huge manager, and he starts to direct her in this more commercial direction.”
“It provides for a challenge in the film, and that was a challenge in my career as well,” she notes. “That’s the closest to me that I felt in the film as Ally.”
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