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Louise Thomas
Editor
Lady Gaga has revealed why she thought her fiancé Michael Polanksy’s proposal was a joke.
The 38-year-old singer reflected on her engagement during Friday’s (September 27) episode of The Graham Norton Show while discussing the release of her forthcoming movie, Joker: Folie à Deux.
“He proposed on April first and I thought he was joking,” Gaga explained. April 1 is, of course, known as April Fool’s Day – a designated holiday for jokes and pranks.
The “Bad Romance” singer then recalled how the big news ultimately slipped out in July, while she and Polanksy were in Paris for the 2024 Olympics.
“Then when we went to the Olympics, we were filmed saying hello to the Prime Minister and I was caught on camera saying, ‘This is my fiancé.’ I had wanted to keep it a secret!” she added.
During an interview with Vogue, published last month, Gaga – whose real name is Stefani Germanotta – first opened up about how the proposal happened after a day of rock climbing in April. For the following months, the two sparked engagement rumors as the singer was seen wearing what appears to be an eight-carat, oval engagement ring on her left-hand ring finger.
“The missing piece in my life was having real love,” she told Vogue.
Although Gaga never expected Polanksy to be the one for her when they first met, her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, had a good feeling about him.
“My mom met him and she said to me, ‘I think I just met your husband,’ and I said, ‘I’m not ready to meet my husband!’ I could never have imagined that my mom…found the most perfect person for me?” Gaga recalled.
The “Poker Face” singer and Polansky didn’t meet until 2019 while at the 40th birthday party of Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster and founding president of Facebook, who was an associate of Polansky.
“I got invited and I said, ‘I wonder if Michael is going to be there,’ and my mom said yes, and so I went to the party and I kept asking for him and he finally came over to me and we talked for three hours,” Gaga said.
Following a few phone calls and their first date, the Covid-19 pandemic began, which resulted in the two of them quarantining together at Gaga’s house in Malibu.
“We had this amazing chapter of a weird kind of normalcy,” Polansky shared. “That’s essential for any relationship to develop in a real way – taking walks, making coffee, hanging out with the dogs, reading books together.”
Elsewhere in her appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Gaga was asked about playing Harley Quinn in Joker: Folie à Deux, alongside Joaquin Phoenix, who plays her love interest, Arthur Fleck.
“I tried to root her in reality and create Arthur’s love match,” she said, before praising the film itself. “It breaks genre in many ways – it’s funny, it’s a drama, there’s dance, there’s music, and everything conspires to make this unique and special film,” she added.
She also shared how her co-star felt about recording all the music live for the movie. “Joaquin did not like it at first, which was hard, but he did it and was phenomenal,” she said. “It was really fun and interesting to do and watching it back it may be the most vulnerable singing I have ever done.”
When discussing her new album Harlequin, a companion piece to the film, she added: “It is all original production but inspired by the character. She cannot be defined, and the songs reflect that.“
