Lady Gaga, Nicole Kidman, & More Cover THR's Actress Roundtable Issue

Awards season contenders Lady Gaga, Glenn Close, Kathryn Hahn, Nicole Kidman, Regina King, and Rachel Weisz are on the cover of THR‘s Actress Roundtable issue!

Here’s what the stars had to share…

Rachel, on the problem with “strong woman character”: “I have a real problem with the idea of ‘strong women characters.’ Well, does that mean we have muscles or something? No one ever says that to a man. But [I want] young girls growing up [to] see stories being told where a woman takes a central role. Where she is not peripheral to the story. She’s driving the story, and so, you as a kid can go, ‘Oh, that’s me. I can identify.’ So, it’s like a funny thing that [these stories] are coming together as women have been speaking up about harassment … The Favourite apparently took 20 years to make. Because there is lesbianism and three females at the center of it.”

Regina, on the one part she wants to play: “A Joan of Arc-type character. Someone in history that wasn’t black but I thought was a pretty amazing woman … wouldn’t it be fantastic if I did play Joan of Arc?”

Gaga, on the long road to A Star Is Born: “I wanted to be an actress before I wanted to be a singer or musician … For many years, I have created characters for myself. Because I did not make it as an actress. So, I made characters that I could be — so that I could be one. They were always in some way related to the woman that I wanted to sing to, and a part of me. So, like for my album Joanne, I had this vision of a woman with a baby in one hand and a pinot grigio in the other, in cutoff jeans. And her hair wild and in a bun .. With Bradley [Cooper], what I did was, I said, ‘OK, I’m going to have to become someone that I do not have complete control over.’ I dyed my hair very early, before we started filming. I started to dress like her. I was writing music for the soundtrack and helping to hone Ally’s sound, which was essentially something that was going to arise out of Jackson’s sound, because she fell in love with him. I wanted Ally to be nothing like me. This was very important to me because the truth is, I am nothing like Ally. I created Gaga.”

For more from the stars, visit HollywoodReporter.com.