World’s best Gaga impersonator on how she’s preparing for Mayhem: ‘I don’t leave my sewing machine’

The odd thing about being a Lady Gaga drag impersonator for the past nine years is that, for more than half of that time, the pop superstar has been without a new album. Now, thanks to Mayhem, that’s about to change.

Mayhem, Gaga’s seventh studio album due for release on Friday (7 March), is her first since 2020’s Covid 19-struck Chromatica.

She’s hardly been holed up in front of the TV for five years – from the much-forgotten House of Gucci to the much-delayed Chromatica Ball to the much-maligned Joker: Folie à Deux, Gaga has been a busy woman – but 7 March marks the blooming of a new, more prosperous era for the pop culture juggernaut.

To any ordinary Gaga impersonator, now is a time of gay panic and frantic bulk-buying of black Scream 3 wigs. For Nick Gaga, the world’s premium Lady Gaga impersonator since 2016, it’s – to quote the woman herself – just another day.

“It’s more excitement, but no stress,” the 29-year-old says, via morning audio call from her loft apartment – “literally a Gaga museum archive at this point” – in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, where she moved from her native Russia ten years ago. “As much as I am a Gaga fan, I take my job so seriously that every time that there is a new era approaching, or a new music video or something like that, I am there, ready.”

So, when Gaga debuted dark hair on the red carpet at the Gaga Chromatica Ball film premiere last May, which Nick had been invited to, she stocked up on black wigs, foreseeing black bangs as a staple part of the Mayhem era. Or, when Gaga debuted the album’s alternative covers in late January, Nick managed to recreate them within hours. “The process was, is still, not too chaotic,” she says. It’s no biggie. 

It takes a seconds-long look at Nick’s tapestry of work to understand why she’s seen as the very best Gaga impersonator around. In terms of looks, Nick has recreated dozens of Mother Monster’s most outrageous outfits, each one sewn and stoned using if not the exact original materials, then something indiscernible.

“Everything that she wears or presents is so different every single time… sometimes it might take me an hour to replicate something, and sometimes it might take me years to replicate something, and I’m not even exaggerating,” she says. A few years back, she made a carbon copy of the baby blue, geometric telephone headpiece used in 2010’s “Telephone” video. From start to finish, it took two years. “I literally sometimes don’t leave my sewing machine for 48 hours or more.”

Nick takes the looks to stage too for a monthly “Gaga Ball” performance at Midtown Manhattan gay bar, Balcon Salon. The events are often complete, step-perfect recreations of Gaga’s own tours, from her inaugural The Fame Ball to the most recent Chromatica Ball, complete with a team of dancers and her choreographer, Eli.

At February’s Gaga ball, they performed the glitchy, TikTok-consuming choreo for recent single “Abracadabra”. Everyone wants to learn those jolty, paws-up moves from the music video’s post-chorus – a step-by-step tutorial currently has more than 100,000 views on YouTube – but it’s not an easy feat. “That was a challenge, for sure,” says Nick.

Other Gaga Balls amalgamate the 14-time Grammy winner’s greatest hits, and bubble with Nick’s own creative vision for Gaga’s shows. “Basically the whole month is the preparation process, not just choreography, but also props, right staging, right lighting, right visuals that go behind my back,” Nick explains.

She even assists with the business side of things, too. “I haven’t even had a coffee or breakfast,” she tells me, as she’s been too busy designing promotional flyers. On Friday, it’s “MAYHEM: The Album Release Rave”. On 29 March, there’s the “Mayhem Ball”, an imagined version of what Gaga could and should do for her next world tour, which is heavily rumoured to be happening this year.

Nick met Lady Gaga in Moscow in 2012

Nick’s love affair with Lady Gaga began, if you will, as a bad romance. Or rather, with the “Bad Romance” music video. She was 14 at the time and still living in Russia. As the country’s alignment with pop culture trailed behind its western counterparts, Nick missed Gaga’s nascent career boom with “Just Dance” and “Poker Face”, but by the time she arrived all pearlescent and googly-eyed for the “Bad Romance” video, she was locked in.

From “Bad Romance” alone, Nick understood the world of Gaga as a reflection of her own. She’d been on stage in theatre productions from the age of seven, and graduated as a musical theatre actor aged 11. A protean musician, Nick was proficient in violin, piano and saxophone from a young age. Then, aged 10, her interest in fashion blossomed too. “That whole music video was very hard-hitting and inspirational,” she says, a rich blend of her personal loves.

From then on, things got hardcore: when Gaga announced she was coming to Moscow for the 2012 Born This Way Ball, Nick set to frantically fundraising for a ticket at school (it was at this show that Gaga demanded Russian authorities “arrest” her for violating the country’s law against promoting homosexuality).

Nick camped outside the city’s Olympic Stadium in Baltic December temperatures, “Born This Way”-style skull-and-bones make-up sketched on her face, for two days. Right before the show, Gaga’s manager invited her backstage to meet Mother Monster herself. They spoke “for at least an hour” about Nick’s dream of moving to the US to become an actor. “It felt like a million years,” Nick recalls now.

While together, Nick didn’t necessarily blub in typical fan-meets-idol fashion about how Gaga had saved her life, but she sort of did – Nick just wouldn’t know it for a few years, until Gaga released 2013’s unfairly mocked Artpop. “I was physically attacked multiple times in Russia and one of the times… I got into a coma,” she shares, stoic at the memory.

“I survived, but that was around the same time when the album came out, and that helped me through the process of getting out of it. And also at the same time when I came to the realisation that I need to leave the country if I want to survive.” She believes record’s last single “G.U.Y” was critical to that survival. “That song was literally stuck in my head at the same time when I was in a coma. So it was like the whole song was the reason, what got me through, I think.”

As for whether Gaga knows the profound impact she had on Nick, or how her influence turned the drag star into an A-grade impersonator, remains to be seen. “She’s obviously aware,” Nick says, considering their in-person conversation and the invite to the Gaga Chromatica Ball premiere.

She’s left a few stray comments on Nick’s TikTok page, too. “I’m still, up to this day, not sure how exactly she feels about me going so hard and impersonating her,” she adds, sounding a little exposed for the first time in our conversation. “I want to hear her thoughts on how she feels about her impersonators, not just me, but around the world. I’m very curious about that.”

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Not that Nick has much brain space to worry about it. There’s prep for Friday’s Mayhem Album Release Rave to do. In addition to a full routine from Nick Gaga, the show will feature an impressive array of dancers and other drag acts, plus an immersive archive of original outfits and artifacts worn by Gaga herself. It’s a lot of work, but then Saturday will roll around, and Nick will be looking ahead to The Mayhem Ball at the end of the month.

“I’m going to create and produce as many new numbers as possible with all of the new music that we will get from Lady Gaga,” she teases of the latter event. “The creative process will fully start after March 7th. But for now, I’m just going to breathe, and take it in.”

Tickets for the MAYHEM: The Album Release Rave and The Mayhem Ball are available now.

Lady Gaga’s new album Mayhem arrives on 7 March.

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