by Michelle Ruiz– Vogue
A Star Is Born, the all-consuming, tear-jerking Titanic of our time, almost looked—and sounded—very different. Actor, director, and all-around auteur Bradley Cooper reveals in a new Variety profile of Lady Gaga that he considered not playing the role of veteran singer-songwriter Jackson Maine himself.
“I saw this other person that I wanted to do this, who is an actual musician,” Cooper says. “But [the studio] wouldn’t make the movie with him.” And while he has cited Eddie Vedder as an inspiration for the character, Variety reports that the musician in question was White Stripes frontman Jack White, whom he met with before Gaga had entered the picture.
No spoilers, but early scripts of Cooper’s A Star Is Born also had different endings than the final version now devastating fans in theaters. “The first ending that I read, [Jackson] actually swims out into the ocean, where he commits suicide,” Toby Emmerich, chairman of Warner Bros. Pictures Group, tells Variety. “The script that we had when he started shooting, he rides his motorcycle. It was more like the Kris Kristofferson ending in the 1976 version with the Ferrari . . . but Bradley changed his mind and came to see me and pitched the idea of what he ended up shooting. I think he was right. When I watch the movie now, I can’t imagine it ending any other way.”
And while it is similarly unfathomable to envision anyone but Cooper and Gaga searing hearts in this latest, $300 million–grossing, Oscar-buzzy remake of the Hollywood classic, other female leads were considered to star in modern revivals long before Gaga was cast. Most notably, there was a 2011 version in which Beyoncé was, for a short time at least, attached to costar with Cooper and director Clint Eastwood. Other false starts had been kicked around since the ’90s, according to producer Bill Gerber.
“Anytime a big pop star broke, we would talk about it,” he said. “Hey, should we do A Star Is Born with Lauryn Hill or Aaliyah? Whitney Houston had been talked about way back when.”
Ah, what could have been! But when the sun goes down and the band won’t play, we’ll always remember it this way.