“Lady Gaga has revealed she was in mental turmoil during the filming of A Star Is Born (Picture: AP) Lady Gaga’s acting career took off with a bang in 2018, when A Star Is Born became a global sensation. The film dominated conversations for months, earning eight Oscar nominations and turning Shallow into a huge”, — write: metro.co.uk
Lady Gaga has revealed she was in mental turmoil during the filming of A Star Is Born (Picture: AP) Lady Gaga’s acting career took off with a bang in 2018, when A Star Is Born became a global sensation.
The film dominated conversations for months, earning eight Oscar nominations and turning Shallow into a huge hit.
To the outside world, it looked like a peak moment in a relentlessly upward career for Lady Gaga.
But the popstar, 39, has now revealed that things were very different behind the scenes.
In a new interview for the December issue of Rolling Stone, published just days after her album Mayhem picked up seven Grammy nominations, she speaks with startling directness about what was really happening during that era of her life.
She admits she filmed the movie while taking strong psychiatric medication, saying flatly: ‘I did A Star Is Born on lithium.’ The medication stabilised her enough to work, but it masked a deeper collapse she didn’t yet understand.
She said her sister looked at her one day and said ‘I don’t see my sister anymore’
(Picture: Greg Swales) 
She gave her fiance, Michael Polansky, a lot of credit for her recovery (Picture: Greg Swales) Throughout the film’s production and the global circus that followed, Gaga’s inner world was disintegrating even as her public star soared.
She was performing at the Super Bowl, accepting Golden Globes, and walking red carpets while privately drifting further away from herself. The unraveling accelerated during the Joanne World Tour, when she experienced what she now calls a psychotic break.
She remembers her sister looking at her one day and saying, ‘I don’t see my sister anymore.’
Shortly after, Gaga cancelled the rest of the tour, sought psychiatric care, and stopped everything.
Gaga said she ‘was on lithium’ throughout filming the hit movie (Picture: AP) She says there were moments when she genuinely doubted she would ever return to stability. ‘It was really scary,’ she recalls. ‘There was a time where I didn’t think I could get better… I feel really lucky to be alive. I know that might sound dramatic, but we know how this can go.’
She credits her fiancé, Michael Polansky, with providing a kind of grounding she hadn’t experienced in years.
He calls her Stefani, not Gaga, and sees her as the person behind the elaborate costumes.
She even won the Academy Award for best original song for Shallow (Picture: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP) That intimacy forced complicated questions: ‘How do you learn how to be yourself with someone when you don’t know how to be yourself with anyone?’
That process eventually led her back to music in a new way. Her album Mayhem, released in March and now widely praised as one of her most powerful records, came from piecing together parts of herself she thought she had lost.
‘It was months and months and months of rediscovering everything that I’d lost,’ she tells the magazine. ‘And I honestly think that’s why it’s called Mayhem. Because what it took to get it back was crazy.’
Today, Gaga describes herself as a ‘healthy, whole person’.
Lady Gaga has reinvented herself countless times, but this transformation is quieter and more profound than any aesthetic shift.
Read Rolling Stone’s December 2025 cover story now.
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