UPDATED with video: Lady Gaga has released the video for “Hold My Hand,” the power ballad she co-penned and performs for Paramount/Skydance’s upcoming Top Gun: Maverick, which had its world premiere on Wednesday in San Diego. Watch it above.
Attendees at CinemaCon in Las Vegas got their first taste of the song when the Tom Cruise sequel screened for exhibition last Thursday, and it’s another in Gaga’s and the Top Gun canon that could go all the way to the Oscars.
The original Top Gun won a Best Original Song Academy Award for Tom Whitlock and Giorgio Moroder’s “Take My Breath Away” which was performed by Berlin for the 1986 film. Gaga won an Oscar in the same category for A Star Is Born’s “Shallow” in 2019.
Written and produced by Gaga and BloodPop, with additional production from Benjamin Rice, “Hold My Hand” plays over the end credits of the film which blew the doors off of the Colosseum at Caesars Palace last week. As Deadline’s Pete Hammond noted of the Joseph Kosinski-directed Maverick, it “proves to be perfection as an example of the lost art of what makes a big-scale Hollywood movie.”
Late Monday night Pacific time, Gaga posted pics of her and Cruise on her Instagram:
She had earlier written, “When I wrote this song for Top Gun: Maverick, I didn’t even realize the multiple layers it spanned across the film’s heart, my own psyche, and the nature of the world we’ve been living in. I’ve been working on it for years, perfecting it, trying to make it ours… This song is a love letter to the world during and after a very hard time. I’ve wanted you to hear it for so long.
Gaga also previously posted this:
Following the San Diego premiere, Top Gun: Maverick will have a gala screening at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18 as well as a royal premiere in London and more. The film starts offshore rollout on May 25 and heads to North America on May 27.
The story sees Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell called to train a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen. There, he encounters Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign: “Rooster,” the son of Maverick’s late friend and Radar Intercept Officer Lt. Nick Bradshaw, aka “Goose.” Facing an uncertain future and confronting the ghosts of his past, Maverick is drawn into a confrontation with his own deepest fears, culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who will be chosen to fly it.
Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell and Lewis Pullman also star.