On the face of it, Gigi Hadid and Bradley Cooper are not a couple that makes a ton of sense. He’s 21 years older than her, she’s a model while he’s an actor, he’s known for being super intense while her persona is a bit more easy breezy. But it turns out they have something very specific in common: the ability to get large corporations to indulge their fantasies of inserting themselves into musical theater history. In association with her April 2025 Vogue cover story, Hadid starred in a self-insert fanfic where the creative appears to be “What if Hairspray was somehow even gayer, but had way fewer fat people?” In the video, titled “Gigi Hadid Can’t Stop the Beat,” Hadid lip-syncs to the Hairspray classic “You Can’t Stop the Beat,” before being joined by Cole Escola, Laverne Cox, Alton Mason, and Marc Jacobs. The phrase fever dream gets thrown around a lot these days, but if anything deserves to get some use out of it, it’s this.
“I grew up doing musical theater,” Hadid explained to Vogue. “I love all things musical theater.” She even played Amber Von Tussle in Hairspray, Vogue says, at age nine. For this video, she collaborated with director Bardia Zeinali, who previously directed her on a 2018 Beetlejuice-themed shoot. “It’s been long-cooking,” Hadid said. “We finally got to do it, and we’re so excited.” If you missed that Hadid is obsessed with musical theater, you wouldn’t be alone, but she mentions it multiple times in the cover story. At one point, the writer even suggests that Jon M. Chu should “cast her in one of the sequels” to Wicked, despite the fact that there will be just one sequel to Wicked, and it has, in fact, already filmed.
It’s hard not to compare this strange Hadid fantasy film to her boyfriend Bradley Cooper’s 2023 film Maestro, a Netflix production, which Cooper both directed and starred in as Leonard Bernstein, the composer known for writing the score to West Side Story. In both this fashion-focused video and in noted Oscar-villain Maestro, Hadid/Cooper play around in theater history to ridiculous effect. It tracks for them. One of their first recorded dates was to see the Off Broadway play Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, according to “Page Six,” and they also attended Alyssa Milano’s debut in Chicago this past November, per E!. Hadid told Vogue that Cooper “has opened me up to going to the theater more, and that’s something that’s so nice to bring back into my life.” Just wait until she stars in a Cooper-directed adaptation of Evita, financed entirely by Disney.
Related
- A Timeline of Gigi Hadid and Bradley Cooper’s ‘Hard Launch’
- Bradley Cooper Has Never Been Better
- Why Can’t Music Biopics Be Good?
A lip-sync performance of “You Can’t Stop the Beat” from Hairspray produced for her Vogue cover story.
