02/09/2025: Kevin Hart, Jeff Koons, Dua Lipa
50:34 Share

This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. ShopPay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more sales going cha-ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit Shopify.com to upgrade your selling today.

Now streaming, Academy Award winner Michelle Yeoh takes command. Gather your people. We're gonna need every one of them. In Section 31, a new Star Trek original movie on Paramount+. Section 31 is just a place for people to bend the rules. Starfleet is here to make sure no one commits murder. What a cute idea. This is chaos. Let's get messy. Don't miss Star Trek Section 31. Now streaming exclusively on Paramount+.

Tonight on 60 Minutes Presents, art and performance. The wall is full of great comedians. Kevin Hart is a comedian. I've been 5'5 my whole life, 5'4, 5'2 and a half. A movie star, and as you'll hear tonight, a budding tycoon. Cheers. Are you a billionaire yet? None of your business, man. You trying to get me robbed? You trying to get me knocked in my goddamn head?

I believe the first piece was... Jeff Koons is one of the most prominent and polarizing art stars in the world. His creations may look simple, but they can take decades to make and often push the boundaries of technology and sometimes taste. Critics may scoff at times, but that's nothing new. Jeff Koons has been controversial since he first started showing his art more than 40 years ago. It's unbelievable seeing that many people sing back at you.

I couldn't believe that it was happening in that moment, you know? I'd dreamt about being on that stage my whole life. I'd thought about it. I'd wished it. You'd envisioned it. I'd envisioned it so many times. I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto-friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger. So I can get in more squats anywhere I can. One, two, three.

Three. Will that be cash or credit? Credit.

Galaxy S25 Ultra, the AI companion that does the heavy lifting so you can do you. Get yours at Samsung.com. Compatible with select apps requires Google Gemini account results may vary based on input check responses for accuracy. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistants assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm

I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com.

Good evening, I'm Anderson Cooper. Tonight on 60 Minutes Presents, a break from the headlines with profiles of three of the biggest names in the worlds of art and performance. We'll visit with painter and sculptor Jeff Koons in his studio to explore how he conceives of and creates his wildly expensive and sometimes controversial artwork. Then we'll join pop megastar Dua Lipa at one of the most iconic music festivals in the world where she had once only dreamed of performing.

But we begin with actor and comedian Kevin Hart. There have been plenty of successful stand-up comedians, but few who've managed to do what Kevin Hart has. In addition to becoming a bankable movie star, he's also built an entertainment and business empire. And last March at 44, he was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, as close to a lifetime achievement award as you can get.

Hart's comedy isn't particularly controversial. It's conversational, with a lot of cursing thrown in. He tells revealing stories about his wife and four kids, his embarrassing insecurities, and his many shortcomings. On stage, Kevin Hart is an open book, but when we sat down with him last year, on one topic at least, he was a bit hard to pin down. GQ said you're 5'5", the LA Times says you're 5'4", and some other place said you were 5'2".

Well, that place is bulls**t. GQ finally got it right. 5'5"? 5'5". All right. 5'5", like with a shoe on, like a sneaker. Now, if I put a boot on, I can get to 5'5 1⁄2". Kevin Hart has been telling tall tales about himself on stage for more than two decades. 43 years old. I've been 5'5 my whole life. 5'4, 5'2 1⁄2 my whole life.

is talking about the things that you aren't afraid to laugh at about yourself. I'm really confident that the laugh that I'm getting, you're not laughing necessarily at me as if I'm a joke, you're laughing at the experience. I'm giving you an experience through a story that is relatable and more importantly, I'm saying things that other people just don't have the heart to say.

I mean, you told a story about your wife watching tall people porn. Yeah. He was taller than me. That was your main issue? Yeah. Why is he so tall? Is that what you want? We had a real conversation off the net. Is that what you're looking for? If your search starts with tall-- You can't fix that? Yeah, no, I can't fix that. We got a problem. One of the sites wasn't even porn. One of the sites was a bunch of tall men being active. They were changing light bulbs, putting on shelves, hanging paintings. What kind of is this? What the is this?

She was like, "What? You can't do none of that stuff. I like that stuff." Hart is one of the highest-grossing comedians today. He sells out arenas around the world and the occasional football stadium. We sold a football stadium out tonight, so I need to hear that. The wall is full of great comedians. When we first met him last January in his offices in Los Angeles, he was working on new material for an upcoming comedy tour. To do an hour comedy special,

How long does it take? How many? We need to really work on a set. Eight to nine months. Are you sitting in a room with your team? No. I'm going back to ground zero. Just small comedy clubs. Small comedy clubs. Rooms. I got two guys, Harry Rashford, Joey Wells. They act as my writers. And what they do is they grab my material as I say it.

But you can't write it down for me. Like, I don't like the long jokes or the long sentences. So it has to be in bullet points. Travel. Bad. Bad travel. Why bad travel makes me drive. Driving. Good versus bad. Everything has a good and a bad. My rule is when I get on stage, I would much rather have the dismantled picture in my head

of kind of what I think it is and it not be good, and then figure it out in real time and walk off stage and go, "It was something there." A few hours later, 3,000 people showed up in Pasadena to hear Hart figure out his new jokes on stage. Everyone had to hand over their phones. Careful, brother.

Before he began, Hart explained why. Like 90% of what I'm going to do tonight, I feel like it's really good. The reason why I took your phones is because of the other 10%, right? Like just in case, just in case some of it's not, you don't have no proof.

We agreed not to record any of his routine either, but backstage we found his collaborators, Harry Ratchford and Joey Wells, taking a lot of notes. I appreciate y'all. I'm Kevin Hart. I love you. Good night. How was this audience? This audience was great.

Great. Like, you could feel the laughter never stop. That's the beauty of a theater. The theater lets you really feel the highs and lows of a set. There's so much that he wants to do. Joey Wells and Harry Ratchford, along with comedians Will Spank-Horton and Naeem Lynn, are among Hart's closest friends. They're also known professionally as the Plastic Cup Boys.

What are you actually looking for when he's on a stage and telling a joke? What notes do you have? Harry is always structured. We should put the joke here and move it around. And for me, I'm always just like, how can it be just a little funnier? He might get a standing ovation. I go, that was great. That was great. But what if he tried this?

Just Spank and Naeem have known Hart since he was a teenager, growing up in a rough neighborhood in North Philadelphia. Was Kevin always as confident as he is today? Yes. I mean, it was perplexing in the beginning. Like, why does this little ugly dude have this much confidence? I didn't get it. North Philly. North Philly. Yeah.

I don't know what he thinks he's doing. He swears he can dance. Home movies his mom made show Hart was always the family entertainer. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment with his brother Robert and his mom Nancy Hart. She kept a close eye on Kevin. She planned every moment of your day? Every moment. I had no free time.

After finishing my homework, I had to get to swim practice. Me and my mom would walk home from practice. The homework that I was supposed to do beforehand, she would go over and check and end up making me redo it, 'cause nine times out of ten, I rushed through it just to get it done. She would then make me read

And I would skip pages, not expecting the quiz of the book to come. - Which she would give you. - On the back half, which she would give me when I said I was done, and then she would make me read it again. - Do you credit her with the drive you have? - Absolutely.

Absolutely. His mom also kept Kevin's dad, Henry Witherspoon, at a distance. He was in and out of prison and addicted to drugs, which Hart talked about in a 2011 stand-up special called Laugh At My Pain. I was in a weird, like, spelling bees debate. Now, here's the thing. My dad would show up at my events and treat them as if they were athletic events.

First of all, you can't cheer for no kid in a spelling bee. It's a spelling bee. It's quiet. I'm focused. I'm in the middle of spelling a very difficult word. My dad shows up late, busts through the back door, high as hell, making coke head noises, all right? Once again, I cannot make this up, all right? This is all I heard. I'm in the middle of spelling some... Out of nowhere, all I heard was, all right, all right, all right, yeah!

The actual details of stuff he did are really heartbreaking. Yeah. And yet, you tell it in a way that's funny. Is it heartbreaking to you? No, because... It must have been at the time. I see it for what it was. As a kid, that's dead. By the way, in my environment, that's the norm.

It's normal to see a parent drunk or whatever. Your dad, even in the depths of his drug use, he wanted to see you and your brother. Absolutely. There was a period where he disappeared, but I didn't see him in a long time. And I saw him on the subway, and he was in bad shape. And I was like, Dad? He turned around and saw me. And doors opened, my dad walked off and ran. Later told me I ran because...

It just hurt me for you to see me like that, and that was one of his key factors into going and getting help. Hart was eventually able to help his dad get clean before he died in 2022. My dad is crazy. Kevin said his father loved to hear the stories he told about him in front of thousands of people. So we talk about my dad. We celebrate my dad. But when Hart started doing stand-up at 18, he struggled to find places to perform.

And you would take gigs wherever you could get them? Like, you're talking bowling alleys. You're talking cabarets, strip clubs. I did play strip clubs. Is there a lot of comedy in strip clubs? No! And it's a white thing. There's a lot. No! I don't know who thought that comedy and strippers mix. But I remember one of the most heartbreaking moments for me on stage is, like, in the middle of my set. This was at a strip club. And I remember hearing this lady go, oh, baby. After you told the joke. Oh.

Like, basically. So disgusted and heartbroken that this is what I chose to do with my life. Hart thought he was about to make it big when he shot a sitcom for ABC called The Big House in 2003. The network flew him out to the up-fronts to present the show to advertisers and the media. I'm next to walk on stage so they can announce The Big House. You're the guy with the microphone that's backstage managing the... This is what I say.

He's right here. I'm with him. All right, I'll tell him right now. Kevin, hold up one second. They just said they're not going to go through or pick it up. Somebody should be back here to talk to you shortly. What does that mean? The guy with the microphone is telling you that your series is not being picked up by the network. Not the network exec. Not the CEO of Disney coming out saying, hey. No, no, no. A guy named Barry in the back holding the curtain. It was only because of that rejection. I don't want to feel that.

I don't like that you gotta hire me when you're ready. You're saying that my career is basically determined off of the needs of people that I don't know and that I don't talk to? I might be sitting here all day if I don't go grab it and I don't go make what I feel should be mine. And that is what he did. He started a small production company, now called Heartbeat, and began making his own hour-long stand-up specials.

He also marketed himself relentlessly through social media. Hollywood studios took notice. Get on my back! I would rather die. Jump on my back! Nope, I'm going to die. Let me die!

When he was picked in 2018 to host the Oscars, it seemed like a high point in his career. But then comments he made about gay people years earlier on stage and on Twitter caused controversy. Heart stepped down as the Oscars host. Initially you didn't apologize, later on you did. Well, later on the understanding came from the best light bulb ever.

Wanda Sykes said, "There's people that are being hurt today because of comments like the ones that you made then. And there's people that were saying it was okay to make those comments today based off of what you did then." It was presented to me in a way where I couldn't ignore that. So in those moments of despair, great understanding and education can't come out of it if you're given the opportunity. These days, it's hard to keep track of all the businesses Hart has a hand in.

The weekend we spent with him, he was in constant motion and promotion, starting with his daily pre-dawn workout. 60 minutes. Is this what you want? Huh? This what you want? I'm gonna give you what you want. So the good thing is that we make it out of here. Then he was off to Walmart to publicize a nutrition supplement company he owns. Finally, you're a real person. I am. A fast food chain he started shut down in September.

But he also has a tequila brand and a $100 million venture capital fund. Cheers. And Heartbeat, that little production company he created, was valued at more than $650 million in 2022. I'm no longer just a comedian. I'm an investment. I'm a studio. I'm a partner looking for partnerships. Work for hire is not in my best interest if it's a one and done situation.

That means the endless stream of movies, shows, podcasts, and commercials Kevin Hart pops up in. Chances are, Heartbeat is making money off them, too. Even my stunt double has a stunt double. Are you a billionaire yet? None of your business, man. You trying to get me robbed? You trying to get me knocked out? You will be a billionaire. I mean, hopefully. And even if I don't or if I'm not...

I think the better side to what I've done is create what can become the new norm for other people in the business of funny, for other people in the business of entertainment, right? Not just being a part of the business, but learning and understanding how to be the business. Have you ever spotted McDonald's hot, crispy fries right as they're being scooped into the carton? And time just stands still. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

Streaming February 23rd on Paramount+. It's The Return of 1923. They won't take this place from us. Starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. I pray Spencer can get here. I don't have time. 1923 Season 2. Streaming February 23rd on Paramount+. This ranch is under attack. Our whole way of life is under attack. Streaming Sunday, February 23rd on Paramount+. The Return of 1923. A Yellowstone origin story.

My family is in danger and I don't have time. Starring Academy Award winner Helen Mirren and Academy Award nominee Harrison Ford. I pray Spencer can get here. This fight ain't over. Anything worth having is worth fighting for. 1923 Season 2 streaming Sunday, February 23rd exclusively on Paramount+.

Jeff Koons is one of the most prominent and polarizing art stars in the world. Perhaps you've seen one of his giant balloon dog sculptures or the stainless steel inflatable rabbit he made that resold for $91 million in 2019, the highest prize ever paid at auction for a work by a living artist. I bought a much less expensive work of his at a charity auction about 10 years ago.

His creations may look simple, but as we first reported in 2023, they can take decades to make and often push the boundaries of technology and sometimes taste. Critics may scoff at times, but that's nothing new. Jeff Koons has been controversial since he first started showing his art more than 40 years ago.

You'll find the largest collection of Jeff Koons' work at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles. Visiting it is like showing up at a strange children's party long after the kids have gone to bed. There's a giant painting of a party hat, a porcelain Michael Jackson and his chimp Bubbles, a kind of pop culture pieta. The Hulk even makes an appearance.

The star attraction, a 10-foot tall stainless steel balloon dog sculpture. Kuhn showed it to us after hours. We had to make machines to make this work. They didn't exist. It may look like it's filled with air, but Balloon Dog weighs more than a ton and took Jeff Kuhn six years to make.

I started with a balloon, and I blew it up. I twisted a balloon dog. Did you know how to make a balloon dog? No, I just got a little book, and I saw how you do it, so I twisted it up. I probably made about 50 of them, and I made a mold of it, and then that was used to make the stainless steel pieces.

Originally, when I made this piece, I thought that I could make it for about $300,000, which still, that's a lot of money. But it ended up, just to create the piece, ended up costing me $1.6. Wow. And that was more than what I had sold the work for. That's classic Koons. He's famous for going over budget, and his obsessive attention to detail is legendary.

He spent 20 years figuring out how to turn this mass of aluminum into a 10-foot-tall pile of Play-Doh. To get these basketballs to appear suspended in air, he enlisted the help of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and he used more than 60,000 living flowers to create this 40-foot sculpture of a puppy. Koons often takes famous characters or artworks and plays with them, adding a gazing ball to the Mona Lisa.

Or he elevates everyday things, making them larger, shinier, or surreal versions of themselves. The rabbit's from '86. '86. Like that rabbit, Reese sold six years ago for $91 million. He made four that look like plastic inflatables, but they're highly polished stainless steel and weigh about 150 pounds.

It's iconic because it can represent so many different things. I can think of Easter, I can think of a politician with a kind of a microphone, somebody making proclamations. I can think of a Playboy rabbit. But I think one of the most important things to me, the reason it's reflective and reflecting you, reflecting me, you know, the viewer finishes a work of art. It's about your feelings, your experiences. It's about your potential.

Maybe you're thinking Jeff Koons sounds like a phony self-help prophet. Plenty of critics do. But he does see art as something that can help people have a personal transformation. Art can be anything. I mean, it really can be. My personal experience of art is that you just don't have to bring anything to it other than yourself. So your message to people is you don't need to...

have a thesis in art history to interact with art and what you feel from it is valid. It's as valid as anybody else could experience. Why balloon dogs? Why gazing balls, inflatable rabbit? Memories. You know, around Easter time, I would see a lot of inflatable rabbits in the yards.

I would see gazing balls in people's yards, in their gardens. Our neighbors who do that, I mean, how generous they are for us that we're just driving by or walking by and we can look and we can have a little awe and wonderment just for that second. To me, they're symbols of cultural history. - Coons grew up outside York, Pennsylvania in a rural community where you can still find gazing balls in people's yards.

He has eight children, six with his second wife Justine, to whom he's been married for 22 years. They still live part-time in Pennsylvania in Kunz's grandparents' house, part of an 800-acre farm where they raise horses and cows. I think most people don't envision that this is the life you have as a world-famous artist. You know, I'm very involved with my work, but on the weekends and summers, holidays, it's a really important part of my life.

Kuntz has been drawing and painting since childhood. In 1974, while studying art in college, his mother helped him meet one of his favorite surrealist painters. My mother called me and she said, I just saw in a magazine that Salvador Dali spends half his year in New York City at the St. Regis Hotel.

And I thought, oh, okay, maybe, you know, I'll call. Wait a minute, you just thought you'd call him? I called the St. Regis. I asked for Salvador Dali's room and they put me through. You know, I was quite nervous, but I told him I was a fan and that I would enjoy very much to meet him. And he said, can you come to New York this weekend on Saturday? And I said, yes. He said, be in the lobby at 12 o'clock.

and I'll meet you then." And he was spectacular. It would never have occurred to me to, like, just call Salvador Dali in his hotel room. I had nothing to lose, you know? Coons and Dali spent the afternoon together, and at the end of it, he asked the world-renowned artist to pose for this picture. I remember he put his mustache up, and he was telling me, you know, "Kid, hurry up. I can't hold this pose all day." But I left New York that evening,

feeling like I could do this. After finishing school, he hitchhiked to New York and started making art in his Lower East Side apartment, buying cheap plastic inflatables and putting them on mirrors. Kuhns had grand ambitions, but he needed cash to realize them.

So eventually I became licensed and registered to sell commodities and mutual funds. And so, you know, that's what I started to do to be able to make more money to make the works. That's not a career move a lot of artists

Well, you know, I did it only that I could make enough money to make my vacuum cleaner pieces. The vacuum cleaners he's talking about were what first got him noticed in 1980. He bought about 20 brand-new vacuums and displayed them in cases with fluorescent lights. It was part of a series called The New.

I was showing them for their newness that this was a brand new object. It was never used. You can see that it's clean, it's pristine, its lungs are pure. And there's also some sensual aspects to it too. Sensual aspects? Sensual, I mean you have the handle and you have the bag right there. It could be looked at as masculine or you could look at it and say, "Oh, you know, the bag is the womb."

Art definitely is in the eye of the beholder. What did you think of Jeff Koons as an artist when he first sort of came on the scene? I was interested in him, and I also was kind of repulsed by him. Robert Storr, former dean at the Yale School of Art, was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York when it acquired some of Koons' vacuums in 1996. I think some of the work is really unpleasant, but it doesn't mean it's not serious. What's unpleasant about it?

The imagery is vulgar. Vulgar means many things. It means of the people rather than of the elites. It's taking an object which the New York elites might look at and think, oh, that's tacky, that's trashy, that's something you buy in a gift shop, and it's blowing it up and making it perfect and saying that this has value? It has meaning, not necessarily value, but it has meaning. What is the message of that? The message is that it is there to be embraced.

that it is not to be mocked, that one should not be smugly sure of one's own taste to the point of denying the possibility of other tastes. Is he being honest about that? I think he's being totally honest.

And I think that he has made all of that fair game in a way that we have not seen since Warhol. Like Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons has a factory of sorts, with an assembly line of painters meticulously following his instructions, and dozens of digital assistants, sculptors, and craftsmen all over the world helping make his complex pieces, which are often inspired by very simple things.

This is like a very modern grandmother's closet. Turns out Koons was fascinated by his grandparents' porcelain figurines as a child and has collected hundreds of them. Where did you find this? I found it online. He decided to make this $150 ballerina into a multimillion-dollar, 8-foot-tall marble sculpture. But it wound up taking him 12 years. First, he used a CAT scan machine to digitally map every detail of the figurine inside and out.

Then it took him five years, and the help of MIT scientists, to begin translating all those details into instructions for machines to carve the sculpture. The actual carving took another seven years. Now the work will really progress quickly because... We went with Kunz to a workshop in Pennsylvania to check on the progress.

and found Ayami Aoyama and her team carefully polishing the ballerina by hand. Do you have a sense of how many hours of work is done on a piece? 33,000 hours. 33,000 hours. Hours for just the handwork. It must be exhausting.

I mean, the level of detail and monotony and difficulty of it is incredible. Yeah, it is like a really unique job, I would say. That looks like a sort of a dental tool. What is this? Yeah, that's nail polisher that, you know, ladies actually use. Really? Yeah.

You'll notice Jeff Koons isn't doing the sculpting or painting. He comes up with the ideas and sets the standards, but his artisans do the labor, which has led to criticism, including from our own Morley Safer. So what do you say to the man? About 30 years ago, Morley did a story critiquing contemporary art and likened Koons to a P.T. Barnum selling to suckers. He doesn't actually paint or sculpt.

He commissions craftsmen to do that. Or he goes shopping for basketballs and vacuum cleaners. Is that a legitimate criticism? It's a legitimate criticism if you look at art in a way that you're

kind of want everything to be done by the artists themselves. But it becomes very limited what you can do within one life if you're being responsible for everything. It's like the production of this program right now.

Anderson, if you had to be responsible for the lighting, if you had to be responsible for editing... If I was responsible for the lighting, we wouldn't see you or myself. But if you'd have to be responsible for everything, I mean, how many programs would you be able to create? I've designed, worked on the systems, so that the whole process, at the end of the day, it's as if every mark was made by myself.

At 70, Kunz has reached a level of commercial success few artists ever imagined. He's helped design cars for BMW, an album cover for Lady Gaga, even a super yacht. And now he's created a permanent art exhibit on the moon.

He made 125 small stainless steel moon sculptures and mounted them on a lunar lander that hitched a ride aboard a SpaceX rocket. Is there something about the atmosphere on the moon that would affect the lifespan of a work?

almost everything. You know, you have tremendous radiation, you have the temperature change, at least 250 degrees difference from night to day. One of the most inhospitable environments that you could imagine for a work of art.

The moon sculptures are for sale, of course, along with an NFT, or non-fungible token, which serves as digital proof your artwork is actually up there. You'll also get one of these larger moons to show off here on Earth. He won't say how much it'll cost you, but with Jeff Koons, it's a safe bet the price tag will be out of this world.

Prepare to be entertained. Gladiator 2 is now streaming on Paramount+. You hear that crowd? It's ferociously entertaining. I'm just here for the games. And an absolute triumph. Take your father's strength. His name is Maximus. Paul Meskel, Pedro Pascal, with Connie Nielsen and Denzel Washington.

Strength and honor. Strength and honor. Gladiator 2, directed by Ridley Scott. Now streaming on Paramount+. Rated R. Let the bodies hit the... Think about how screwed up we would be if we had survived a plane crash only to end up eating each other. The only way to truly be safe is to be the only one left. You really are insane. Yellow Jackets, new season, streaming February 14th on the Paramount+, with Showtime Plan.

Plenty of teenagers want to become pop stars, but few convinced their parents to let them pack their bags and move to another country to try and make it big. That's what Dua Lipa did when she was just 15 years old. She'd taken some singing lessons, but didn't know anything about the business of making music. Turns out, she's a quick study. As we first reported last fall, at 29, she's now one of the top female recording artists in the world.

Take a look at what happened last summer when she headlined Britain's biggest music festival, Glastonbury. She was singing one of the first songs she released nine years ago. Back then, hardly anyone knew who Dua Lipa was. But at Glastonbury, 100,000 people came to see her. They sang along to her every word. Sabria, as loud as you can, come on! Oh my God, yeah. One more time, louder! You're making my dreams come true, louder!

It's unbelievable seeing that many people sing back at you. I couldn't believe that it was happening in that moment. You know, I dreamt about being on that stage my whole life. I thought about it. I wished it. I'd envisioned it so many times.

I had written down, "I want to headline Glastonbury on the Pyramid Stage on the Friday night." Being very specific about the Friday night so I could party afterwards. Wait a minute, so even in your dream it was to do Friday night so you could stay at Glastonbury? So I could stay Saturday, Sunday. And go out dancing and be in the crowds? Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, you've got to be specific about your dreams, you know? Dua Lipa isn't afraid to admit she enjoys a good time.

And that's what her music is all about. The songs are fun and flirtatious. She sings of boy breakups and girl power, late nights and dark clubs. It is pure pop. Dua Lipa's got no problem with that. You're always met with some kind of pushback as a female artist if you're not like,

with a guitar or with a piano, just like, "Oh, she can't sing. Oh, it's all processed. Oh, it's this. Oh, it's whatever." I just think there's just like a stigma around pop music. But that was the music which you wanted to do from the beginning. Because I loved it. That's the music that makes me get up and dance. Don't let the laid-back demeanor fool you. Dua Lipa has worked hard and come a long way to make all this look easy.

Come on, dance with me. I'll never take you. Dua, whose name means love in Albanian, was born in London. Her parents had moved there from Kosovo after the war in Bosnia broke out in 1992. She started singing lessons at nine, but her family returned to Kosovo when she was 11.

Four years later, she decided to go back to Britain and try and become a pop star. That was the plan? That was the plan, always. The pitch to your parents was, in order to go to a British university, I need to go to high school in England. Yeah, that was the initial pitch. Her father, Dukajin Lipa, is now her manager. Did you buy that pitch? Of course we did. But she's underplaying the fact that she was always...

very mature even at 15 and yeah it is a little bit crazy saying like oh 15 years old she persuaded you to to let her go but her maturity and our relationship was you knew she could handle it of course it sounds like you were a very confident 15 year old yeah i think more confident than i am now for sure i'm dua i'm 15 years old and i'm going to be singing super duper love by just stone promise me

In London, she immediately started recording herself singing covers of her favorite artists and putting the videos on YouTube. This is one of the first ones she made in 2011. She was living with a family friend, but was pretty much on her own. She skipped school so often, she flunked out. Basically, I got expelled. And I remember calling my parents, and they're like, "Okay, well, you did this.

find yourself a school, or you're going to come back to Kosovo. She did find another high school and graduated, but decided college could wait. Her cover songs online had gotten some notice. Just three years after leaving Kosovo, 18-year-old Dua Lipa got a record deal with Warner Brothers. ♪ Baby, I'd rather be a blind boy ♪ ♪ Than to see you walk away, walk away from me ♪

I walked in with a dream of I want to sing, I want to perform, I want to write. I had no idea of what comes with it or what other things I have to do or even what goes into the promotion of a record. While working on her first album, she began releasing singles and performing wherever she could. It's harder and harder to breathe.

We were doing really small shows where the stage was like a step above the floor. So how many people were like for your first performances? About ten. Ten? Wow. And how many were like friends and family? Well none but they all got offered a drink to come and watch. So that was how we got them to come and watch us perform. It's like puppet show and spinal tap. It's both of those together. Talking in my sleep at night, making myself crazy.

That all changed in 2017 when her first album came out and she made this music video in a hotel in Miami for a song called "New Rules." It became her first major hit in America. The album would earn Dua Lipa two Grammys, one of them for Best New Artist.

When she sang "New Rules" at the Brit Awards on live TV in 2018, the reviews were positive. But some viewers' comments online weren't. One in particular went viral. The comment was from somebody that said, "I love her lack of energy. Go girl, give us nothing." You remember the words? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just spread like wildfire that I had no stage presence or I couldn't perform. So I was like, "All right, well,

I'm just going to prove to you that I can perform and I can dance and I can do all these things. Dua Lipa may have wanted to prove her doubters wrong, but when her second album, called Future Nostalgia, was ready to be released two years later, the timing could not have been worse. My second album came out in March 2020, the very beginning of the pandemic. Was there any talk of delaying?

Yeah, there was. But because I'd spent so long working on it, I was like, this album has to come out. With much of the world locked down, it wasn't clear if anyone would want to listen to dance songs or how she could even promote the album. My whole idea was that this is a record that's supposed to be played in the clubs. I envisioned myself in the club. In the producing of it, the whole thing is like you're in the club. The whole thing is in the club. Dua, how are you?

Good. How are you? Three days after the album's release, she gamely appeared on The Late Late Show with James Corden. Her home had flooded, and she was renting a small studio apartment.

Oh my god and I was having really a bad... ...hair day. Everyone coming together in their living rooms and their kitchens to make this happen. It's crazy.

I love that you were in some random apartment. Yeah, so you can see from there how close I am to the cupboards above, the oven, and the stove top. This is you kicking off the release globally of your album. Globally of my album.

The new album was an extraordinary success, commercially and critically. Billboard, Rolling Stone and others called it one of the best of the year, and Dua Lipa was dubbed the quarantine queen. It worked out in a weird way. Yeah, it did. It didn't end up being, you know, the nightclub experience, but it ended up being the kitchen dance parties and the soundtrack to people's workouts at home to kind of...

keep them sane during that time. It also gave people the fantasy of being out in a club. Being out. I hope so. Last year, she released her third album called "Radical Optimism" and was rehearsing for a year-long 28-country tour.

I'm still getting my timing while I'm rehearsing. Those first beginning notes, the "I don't wanna, I don't wanna," they're really fast. So I just have to practice to make sure that I don't slow the song down and miss my timing. In just nine years of releasing music, Dua Lipa has reached a level of success even she never imagined. Her songs have been streamed by fans more than 45 billion times.

I saw some writers who said that in your songs they don't have a sense of who you are. You're not pouring out your innermost fears and desires and wants. It's something that I just naturally hold back. Some people are just so ruthless with their own private life that they decide to put it all out in a song because they know that it's gonna

attract people's attention and for me it was always important to make music that people really loved. Not because I was

putting someone out on blast or not because I'm doing it for the clickbait, but maybe someone else's expense. Dua Lipa's music may not be controversial, but some statements she's made over the past few years about Israel have been. She's called the current war in Gaza genocide. And in 2021, a well-known rabbi took out this full-page ad in The New York Times criticizing her.

There was a lot of words kind of thrown at me, things that I don't believe represent who I am or what I believe in at all. Like I've always only ever wanted peace, really. It's devastating what's happening over there. There's bombs happening.

between both Israel and Palestine, and children are dying, and families are being separated, and it's just devastating to sit back and see it happen. Some people think what you said was anti-Semitic. Yeah, yeah. And it's just not... I think it was very unfairly treated by the times.

Did that experience make you reticent to be outspoken again? No, because it hasn't stopped me from talking about things that I believe in. Whatever Dua Lipa's political or personal opinions may be, for now, you won't find them in her music. She wants that to be something that will help lift you up, get you out, and maybe, just maybe, take a spin on the dance floor.

Dua Lipa's all-night party at Glastonbury. I'm bloody hot and I'm hungover. At 60minutesovertime.com. I'm Anderson Cooper. Thanks for joining us. We'll be back next week with an all-new edition of 60 Minutes.

More.

Morris Chestnut is Watson. Now streaming on Paramount Plus and new episodes return Sunday, February 16th on CBS.