Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s Oscars performance of “Shallow” from their movie “A Star Is Born” sparked rumors that a romance was budding between the two.
But, according to Gaga, the performance was “orchestrated” to give that impression.
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey for Elle magazine published Wednesday, Gaga said she and Cooper wanted to give the impression that they were in love.
“I mean, we made a love story,” she said of the movie. “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.”
Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.
She continued, “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.”
The plan worked.
Following the Feb. 24 duet, speculation swirled that Gaga and Cooper were actually in love.
“In truth, when we talked about it, we went, ‘Well, I guess we did a good job!'” she told Winfrey of the rumors.
At the time of the Academy Awards performance, Cooper was in a relationship with Irina Shayk. The two reportedly called it quits in June. Gaga split from her fiancé, Christian Carino, in February.
During the interview, Gaga also opened up about how playing the character of Ally in the movie brought up painful experiences for her.
“When I won the Oscar for ‘Shallow,’ I looked at it, and a reporter asked me, ‘When you look at that Oscar, what do you see?’ And I said, ‘I see a lot of pain’,” Gaga said.
“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.”
