Matt Bomer is returning to the American Horror Story franchise, and he’s grateful an old bloody orgy scene with Lady Gaga prepared him for the horrors to come.
The White Collar actor starred in last Thursday’s two-part first episode of American Horror Stories, a spin-off of Ryan Murphy’s award-winning anthology FX series that will feature one horror story plot per episode (in a similar fashion to Netflix’s Black Mirror series). The two-part “Rubber (WO)man Part One” episode follows Bomer’s character Michael and his husband Troy and their teen daughter Scarlett moving into a haunted Los Angeles house that they’re renovating into a space for ghost-themed retreats. But the real unnerving elements of their home life have nothing to do with the actual retreats they hope to host.
While the episode certainly turns bloody, Bomber told the New York Post in an interview Monday (July 19) that nothing will ever physically and psychologically amount to the episode he shot with Gaga for AHS: Hotel. The “Bad Romance” singer played the Countess, the glamorous, bloodthirsty owner of the Hotel Cortez, while Bomer portrayed Donovan, her inamorato, who convinces a couple to partake in a rendezvous-turned-bloodbath with them.
“Honestly, I feel that ever since the blood orgy I did with Lady Gaga, everything is pretty tame after that,” Bomer said in the interview. “I was head to toe Carrie prom scene-esque levels of blood. They basically wrapped us up like sardines in a tarp in between takes of that [scene]. It was Gaga and I, and these two wonderful actors who we’d just met 10 minutes before, lying on a tarp next to each other sandwiched in. And they’d peel the tarp off and we’d do the next take. It was very strange. So after that, any amount of corn syrup [for fake blood] is pretty tame. That was a wild experience. It was certainly memorable.”
Bomer told The Hollywood Reporter when the 2016 episode first aired that he felt uneasy filming the racy scene, but that Gaga (real name Stefani Germanotta) was so relatable and approachable that she made it easier. The enigmatic pop star, who earned a Golden Globe Award that year for her role in AHS: Hotel, broke down why the scene was not just “provocative” for obvious reasons, but how it provoked a deeper, more personal element of Murphy’s storytelling.
“I don’t just simply do things because they are provocative or because they are shocking,” she told THR. “I’m doing it because the story that [Ryan Murphy] is telling about addiction, the story that he’s telling about our own narcissism, the story that he’s telling bout how the human being strives to survive within the challenges of the universe — that to me is what makes the sex so good.”
