If there were 100 people in a room promoting a film and just one of them was Lady Gaga, she would be telling the same half-turn of phrase, half-anecdote about Bradley Cooper, her Star Is Born director and co-star.
Gaga, who plays a singer in the musical film about Bradley Cooper’s character, a drug and alcohol addicted country crooner who can’t handle how jealous he is of her talent, has long been noted by dedicated fans - her Monsters - for repeating herself while on the promotional tour. And it’s not just a little bit, this is Theresa May saying ‘strong and stable’ ahead of the 2017 election levels of repetition.
In a supercut of all of Gaga’s mentions of the ‘100 people in a room’ spiel, we counted no fewer than 11 mentions of the time Cooper picked her out from the crowd: 'You could be in a room of 100 people and 99 don't believe, in you, but [insert something sweet about Bradley Cooper and how he changed her life]'.
To be fair on Gaga, press tours, especially for huge, Oscar-baiting films are rigorous, repetitive nightmares, where Gaga has had to travel across the globe in a really inefficient route, from Paris to Venice to LA to London to LA to Toronto to LA, to talk up a project that she actually finished making a good 16 months ago. So maybe she flings out the same line over and over, because everything is just so monotonous, the same questions, the same delivery, why not add to the same-i-ness of it all in her passionate answers? Or maybe she’s treating this like a musical tour? All the fans, everywhere, want to hear Bad Romance, so she performs it at every gig. Maybe she thinks the fans also want to hear the ‘100 people in a room’ story?
It’s not the first time she’s wheeled out a tidbit over and over again - have you noticed how many times over the years she's said she is Italian-American?
What’s most bizarre about the 100 people in a room line, though, is that the story makes absolutely no sense. Of course Bradley Cooper would believe in Gaga, because she's Lady Gaga. She's already been Oscar-nominated, she's won Grammys, she is literally one of the two or three biggest pop stars in the world right now. Would 99 people really turn her down? Why is she acting like she’s Ally, her character, a no-mark who is allowed to sing covers at a drag bar, rather than powerful advocate and graduate of performing arts school Gaga? Do 99% of people not believe in her? Is she still an underdog?
Then again, maybe this is all an act. And if she can pull off pretending she’s not really one of the most famous and talented faces in the world, or wasn't ever in the running to play an all-singing, all-mothering wife of the leading star of A Star Is Born, well then that deserves an Oscar.