In a new Rolling Stone cover story, Lady Gaga reveals that she had a mental breakdown during the making of A Star Is Born and the subsequent months of her Joanne world tour. As the pop icon candidly admitted, “I did ‘A Star Is Born’ on lithium,” referring to the drug used to treat and prevent manic episodes.
“One day, my sister said, ‘I’m never going to see her again,'” Gaga recalled. “And then I canceled the tour. There was a day when I went to the hospital for psychiatric treatment. I needed to rest. I couldn’t do anything… I completely crashed. It was really scary. There were times when I didn’t think I would ever recover. … I feel really lucky to be alive. As dramatic as it may sound, we know how this happens.”
During this time, Gaga was going through one of the busiest periods of her career. A Star Is Born, in which Gaga plays a rising pop star opposite Bradley Cooper as a fading country singer, began filming in April 2017. Months earlier, Gaga released her album Joanne in the fall of 2016 and headlined the Super Bowl halftime show. The tour of the same name began in August 2017, after filming for A Star Is Born, and continued until February 2018. Gaga canceled her last performance. The tour will have a total of 10 performances. “A Star Is Born” was then released in the fall of 2018, starting with its premiere at the much-talked-about Venice Film Festival. The film’s press tour continued until the Oscars ceremony in February 2019, where Gaga was nominated for Best Actress and won Best Original Song (for “Shallow”).
Gaga primarily credits her relationship with fiancé Michael Polanski with protecting her mental health. The two started dating in 2020. She explained, “Loving someone who cares about me for who I really am has made a huge difference.”
That love sustained Gaga through another tumultuous moment in her career, Joker: Folie à Deux. Joaquin Phoenix stars opposite Gaga’s Harley Quinn in the Oscar-winning Joker sequel, but the 2024 film received dismal reviews. The box office was even worse. Folie à Deux was a major flop, grossing just over $200 million worldwide, a significant drop from the original’s $1 billion box office gross. Although Gaga received solid reviews for her performance, the rest of the film was torn apart by the press.
“I was totally unfazed,” Gaga told Rolling Stone about her reaction to the film’s poor reception. “It’s funny, I’m almost nervous to talk about my reaction. But to tell you the truth, when it first started happening, I started laughing because it was so destabilizing. When something takes a while to go away, it can be a little more painful, just because I put so much of myself into it.”
Gaga channeled the negative reaction to the Joker sequel into her music, particularly the music video for Disease. It was the first single from her new album, Mayhem, and ended up returning Gaga to the heights of pop stardom. The album is currently nominated for a Grammy Award for Album of the Year.
“There was a lot of negativity around ‘Joker,’ and I think at the time I felt artistically rebellious,” Gaga said. “I put a lot of that energy into that video. I was there and, you know, I was like, ‘I’m going to show you who I am, and I’m going to show you what this fight is like.’
To read Gaga’s full cover story, visit Rolling Stone’s website.
