Sia Says That She Was Suicidal After Everyone Hated Music And That Kathy Griffin Saved Her Life
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Last year, the Australian pop star Sia made her directorial debut with a movie called Music. The whole enterprise went very, very badly. Now, Sia says that she was suicidal after the release of Music and that the comedian Kathy Griffin saved her life.
Sia makes those revelations in a New York Times feature about Kathy Griffin, and the story presents them as an aside. The story is almost entirely about Griffin’s attempt to get her career going again after she posed for a photo of Donald Trump’s fake severed head in 2017. (Griffin, it’s worth noting, has an enjoyably absurd guest-star arc on the new season of Search Party.)
Sia doesn’t elaborate much in the article. She says, “I was suicidal and relapsed and went to rehab… [Griffin] saved my life.” Sia and Griffin have become close recently, and the two of them went to the Hollywood restaurant Craig’s together so that paparazzi could take pictures of them. (After the Trump-severed-head thing, Judd Apatow had allegedly turned down Griffin’s request to go to Craig’s with her.) Sia says, “We were joking that we were on Survivor: Hollywood.”
Music starred Kate Hudson as a young woman forced to take care of her nonverbal autistic younger sister, whose name is Music. Maddie Zigler, the young dancer from a bunch of Sia videos, played Music. Zigler is not on the autism spectrum, and when some people objected to that casting decision, Sia got angry and defensive on Twitter. When Music was nominated for Best Picture and Best Actress at the Golden Globes — freak nominations that were widely believed to say more about the priorities of the Golden Globes than the quality of Music — Sia apologized for its depiction of autism. Critics hated Music, and the film earned less than a million dollars at the global box office. Sia won the Razzie Award for Worst Director.