Bradley Cooper Finally Breaks Silence On Lady Gaga Dating Rumors & Steamy Oscar Performance
The actor and director opened up about how his ‘A Star Is Born’ co-star helped put him at ease before their iconic Oscars performance.
Almost two years after his romantic duet with Lady Gaga at the 91st Academy Awards, Bradley Cooper finally opened up about the performance that sent the internet spiraling with dating rumors between the two. Bradley revealed why the two seemed to have such great chemistry during the 2019 award show in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday November 17.
After Gaga starred in Bradley’s directorial debut A Star Is Born alongside him, the pair also took the stage at the Oscars for an incredible performance of the movie’s song “Shallow,” and it certainly got the internet excited! Due to their intimacy onstage, fans were convinced that the two actors (who played a couple in the movie), must have fallen in love for real, and were rooting for them to get together.
In the new interview, Bradley admitted that performing next to an international popstar helped him relax for singing live, which he hadn’t been known for prior to the movie. “Just from a personal standpoint, it reduces the anxiety level,” he told THR. He also said that intimate nature of their performance was all part of recapturing what made the song so powerful in the movie. “They kind of fall in love in that scene in the film. It’s that explosive moment that happens to happen to them on a stage in front of thousands of people. … It would have been so weird if we were both on stools facing the audience,” he explained.
During the performance, Bradley was still dating Irina Shayk, whom he shares a daughter with, but fans were still enamored with Gaga and the Silver Linings Playbook actor. Gaga has admitted on past occasions that the two don’t share romantic feelings. She said that the two had “fool[ed] everyone,” during a January 2020 interview with Oprah Winfrey, when addressing the romance rumors. She offered similar sentiment that her co-star did in his recent interview. “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. We wanted it to go through through the lens of the camera and to every television that it was being watched on,” she said. “It was orchestrated as a performance.”