What was the first movie Lady Gaga starred in as an actor?
Even though her filmography is nowhere near as extensive as many other singers and musicians with a secondary career in acting, Lady Gaga has already established herself as one of the most talented double threats in the business.
Not that she boasts a 100% success rate when swapping the stage for the screen, though, but her track record is still better than most. That’s been true since the very beginning when Stefani Germanotta made her acting debut in an uncredited background role.
Hardly the splashiest way to announce her arrival onto the scene, but it came in ‘The Telltale Moozadell’, the ninth episode of the third season of The Sopranos, so history will always remember that Gaga’s first acting role ever was part of a TV show celebrated by many as the greatest of all time.
Gaga has only made two more appearances on television as characters other than herself in the two decades since, but she made them count. Her involvement in the fifth season of Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story as Elizabeth Johnson was initially waved off in certain quarters as the show’s latest example of celebrity stunt casting, only for her performance to make the doubters eat their words.
For her efforts, Gaga won a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film’ before returning in the subsequent season as immortal witch Scáthach. She’s only acted in three TV shows in her life, but one classic and an award-winning turn is a damned good batting average.
On the big screen, Gaga has been equally selective, which has been a blessing and a curse. Todd Phillips’ sequel Joker: Folie à Deux will mark only the fifth time she’s played a character in a feature, a slow-burning cinematic career that’s brought recognition from the organisations who celebrate the best and worst that Hollywood has to offer.
She won an Academy Award for ‘Best Original Song’ for A Star Is Born track Shallows, a film that also landed her on the ‘Best Actress’ shortlist, scooped her a Bafta in the corresponding category, and landed her a Golden Globe nomination. It was a phenomenal showcase for Gaga as both a singer and an actor, but she ended up going too far down the method rabbit hole for her next major acting gig.
Immersing herself into Patrizia Reggiani for Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci made her a source of ridicule, especially when she claimed that she’d spent no less than 18 months staying in character to do justice to the convicted criminal. She may have notched another Golden Globe nomination under her belt, but it would be fair to say her performance was closer to Razzie-worthy.
From winning acclaim alongside the rest of the A Star Is Born cast to sharing the screen with Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck in the pseudo-musical Joker sequel, it’s been nothing if not an interesting journey for Lady Gaga and the movies. Everybody has to start somewhere, but where did she make her first outing as an on-camera performer?
So, what was Lady Gaga’s first movie?
There’s no concrete pipeline in place to bring a bestselling musical artist into the world of cinema for the first time, but as far as unexpected debuts go, Gaga’s arrival in the sequel to a movie based on a fake trailer played halfway through a notorious box office bomb came out of the blue.
Rewarding Danny Trejo with a rare leading role, Robert Rodriguez couldn’t let the ghosts of Grindhouse lie, positioning his regular collaborator as the focal point of his own Machete movie, which performed well enough in cinemas and on home video to give rise to a sequel.
Gaga fit in nicely with the rest of the ensemble gathered for Machete Kills, if only because it was an eclectic bunch of randomly assembled names. Mel Gibson, Michelle Rodriguez, Jessica Alba, Vanessa Hudgens, Amber Heard, Elon Musk, and Charlie Sheen were all on board, but her role was the most unusual of the bunch.
Playing a mysterious killer known as El Camaleón, Gaga shared the role with three other actors. To evade capture and detection, the hired gun regularly changes their identity and appearance, which ultimately saw her as the character’s third iteration, following on from Walton Goggins and Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr before Antonio Banderas rounded out the shapeshifting quartet.
