It makes so much sense that Lady Gaga is obsessed with Bayonetta.
Stefani Germanotta, a pop musician and now movie star who performs under the name Lady Gaga, never seems to do what people expect of her. Her unusual fashion choices are par for the course now, but when she first debuted in 2008 with “Just Dance” and “Poker Face,” people found her aesthetic to be weird and shocking. Some of that was intentional—when you show up to an awards show in a dress made of meat, that’s going to get people’s attention—but some of it was just a marker of how different pop music was then. She was a new kind of spectacle in a post-Paris Hilton, post-recession landscape. She wasn’t flaunting her wealth, but her weirdness, the last scion of a scrappy, dirty, Old New York. People ate it up. I was an instant fan from the word go.
Since her initial rise to pop stardom, Lady Gaga’s career has taken her on a winding road all the way to this year’s starring role in the Bradley Cooper-directed remake of A Star Is Born, which has garnered some whispers of an Oscar nomination. Now that she’s got a little downtime, though, she’s just been playing a hell of a lot of Bayonetta.
It makes perfect sense. A friend once described Bayonetta to me as “a drag show with a video game attached to it.” It stars a seven foot tall witch who dresses like a librarian in clothes made out of her magic hair. She also has guns in her shoes. That is literally just a costume Lady Gaga would wear on the red carpet.
A lot of famous people have nerdy habits. Chrissy Teigan loves Animal Crossing and Mario Kart. Michael B. Jordan loves anime almost as much as he loves women. Kanye West even made a video for his incredibly bad song “I Love It” that references Roblox of all things. At first I was surprised that Gaga was a gamer (as her #gamer hashtag says), but in retrospect, I should have expected it. She’s always looking for new ways to surprise her audience.