For the second time in a week, a celebrity has dropped a surprising and slightly weird fact while appearing on Variety and PBS’ Actors On Actors series. Last time, it was Aaron Paul telling Tom Hiddleston about how a bad attempt to do a card trick for Tom Cruise blew his future of working with J.J. Abrams, and this time we have Lady Gaga revealing to Jamie Lee Curtis that her character on American Horror Story was based on alleged murderer Robert Durst from HBO’s The Jinx. According to Variety’s write-up of the chat, Gaga says she would watch The Jinx “every day” and “sort of study the practical nature” in which Durst “was devious and evil.”
Gaga’s character in American Horror Story: Hotel was a vampire called the Countess, and she was a big fan of stalking the streets of Los Angeles for people she could bring home to her spooky hotel for sex and/or murder, and Gaga says that Durst’s cold practicality in The Jinx “informed” her attitude toward the character. She says that if she “was going to take a guy home and fuck him and then eat him,” she—as in Gaga herself—”wouldn’t know exactly how to do that,” but the Countess would, because she’s “into that sort of necro-romance.”
In the discussion, Gaga also goes into whether or not the “Lady Gaga” persona is also a Countess-like character, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with American Horror Story—unless we’re all living in a new season of the show and just haven’t realized it yet, which is entirely possible.