Lady Gaga looks back on 2005 ‘Boiling Points’ episode 20 years later

Lady Gaga changed the way the world saw pop stars with the release of her 2008 debut album, The Fame, but she also altered global perspectives on food service and salads thanks to her small role on the classic MTV hidden-camera show Boiling Points.

Two decades before the release of her new album, Mayhem, Gaga was just an Italian girl from New York, booking side gigs on television. One of them came in 2005, when Gaga — then credited by her real name, Stefani Germanotta — appeared on season 3, episode 22 of Boiling Points, a prank show that tasked unwitting participants with keeping their cool in manipulated, anger-inducing situations in pursuit of winning $100. Now, in a new video interview about Mayhem (below), Gaga tells Entertainment Weekly what it feels like to look back on her humble beginnings, before she was an Oscar- and Grammy-winning entertainer.

“Oh my goodness,” a stunned Gaga exclaims when EW asks about the show, on which she was — unbeknownst to her — given a 14-minute time limit not to flip out on an actress playing a waitress at a restaurant who brought her a salad with trash on it.

“That was not acting!” she says, reflecting on her career as an up-and-coming actress at that point. “That was just, I mean, so long ago. So embarrassing. I was so excited to be an extra on The Sopranos, I was so excited to be on Boiling Points, because I was gonna be on TV, and I was trying to make my way as an artist.”

Gaga did not end up $100 richer. In the episode, she gets a phone call, leaves, and comes back to find her salad gone — with the waitress questioning her about why she got up from the table to leave. When she brings the salad back, all hell breaks loose.

Gaga asks the waitress, “Who puts that in their mouth? Would you put that in your mouth? It has s— all over it!” Then she is eliminated from the show with just over a minute left to go before she’d have won the cash, all for letting her very New York vocabulary slip out.

“They were just exciting opportunities,” she says. “I look back on that and I just [think] how it was so sweet. Just imagine me screaming in the bathroom or in my dorm room with excitement — and then, you know, 15 years later, being like, ‘I can’t believe this is resurfacing.'”

“So, careful what you wish for!” she adds with a laugh.

In a past EW interview tied to her role in 2021’s House of Gucci, Gaga reflected on her first professional acting gig in 2001: a part as “Girl at Swimming Pool No. 2” on season 3, episode 9 of HBO’s The Sopranos.

“When I look back on that scene I can see exactly what I did wrong in that scene,” Gaga told EW at the time. “I didn’t know how to listen in a scene! I was supposed to laugh, and it was sort of like, cue, laugh … I see it and I go, ‘Oh, that’s not a real laugh!'”

Added Gaga, “I see a very nonspecific actor [on The Sopranos], and now I see myself as someone who is at least really striving to be specific without thinking about it, and that requires a lot of work ahead of time. I really thank my acting teacher, Susan Batson. She and I worked for months and months on this before we filmed — and Ridley Scott, an incredible director who creates a sanctuary for you on set to just fly.”

The groundwork she laid with The Sopranos and Boiling Points paid off. Gaga went on to win a Golden Globe for her role in American Horror Story: Hotel and score a Best Actress nomination at the Oscars for her work in Bradley Cooper’s 2018 movie A Star Is Born — the same film that also won her an Academy Award for Best Original Song for writing the film’s signature tune, “Shallow.”

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Mayhem, the new album from Gaga the singer, features collaborations with Bruno Mars (“Die With a Smile”) and French DJ Gesaffelstein (“Killah”), as well as “Abracadabra,” a Eurodance song that many fans described using the term “reheating her nachos,” meaning when an artist dips back into the creative wells of sounds they perfected earlier in their career.

“I’ve heard this!” Gaga says when asked about the phrase. “I know that it can be used both in positive and negative ways, but I would say that my nachos are mine, and I invented them, and I’m proud of them. So much of what I did with ‘Abracadabra’ was about claiming music and imagery that’s my own invention — meaning the combination of those things is my own invention, and I wanted to really own that for myself. As a woman in music, we’re often told that someone else made us who we are or somehow it didn’t come from us, that we were made that way. But this is who I am.”

Mayhem is out March 7. Watch EW’s interview with Gaga above.