Roseanne Barr says her late friend Lisa Marie Presley once told her that Michael Jackson was, in Barr’s words, “the best lay she ever had.” In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Barr also claimed Presley shared some very specific details about Nicolas Cage. And yes, by “specific,” she means exactly what you think.
What Roseanne Said
Barr, 73, sat down with The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published October 20, 2026, and she did not hold back. Reminiscing about her old social circle, she made it clear who topped her list of party pals.
“The best person that I ran around with was Lisa Marie Presley,” Barr told the outlet.
That puts Presley ahead of Madonna and Sandra Bernhard as a companion, which is quite the ranking. Then Barr got into the kind of ranking that made headlines.
“She said he was the best lay she ever had,” Barr said, referring to Michael Jackson, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
She went further. “She said he was the best lay and he had it going on. She said he told her all the things girls want to hear,” Barr said in the interview, a line Rolling Stone also highlighted in its coverage.
When asked where Jackson landed among Presley’s partners, Barr was crystal clear: “He was number one.”
About Nicolas Cage’s “Business”
Jackson wasn’t the only famous ex who came up. Barr claimed Presley gave her the rundown on Nicolas Cage, too, along with pretty much everyone else she dated.
“She never lied about shit like that. She told me about Nicolas Cage and his business. She told me everybody she was with and their business, the size of it and the use and all of it,” Barr told The Hollywood Reporter.
So, apparently a very thorough debrief. Page Six picked up both the Jackson and Cage portions of the interview, while Us Weekly zeroed in on the Jackson comments.
The interviewer did push back, at one point accusing Barr of lying. She didn’t budge. “No, I’m not [lying],” Barr said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
An important bit of context: these are Barr’s recollections alone. Presley died in January 2023 and can’t weigh in, so readers are getting one friend’s account of private conversations, nothing more.
The Backstory
Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, was born February 1, 1968, and died January 12, 2023. Her romantic history was never exactly low profile.
She married Michael Jackson on May 26, 1994, a union that stunned pretty much everyone. They divorced in August 1996. Her mother had her own view of the match. In her memoir, Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis, Priscilla Presley wrote that she believed Jackson “was marrying the Presley dynasty.”
Presley’s marriage to Nicolas Cage was even shorter.
Presley eventually told parts of her own story. Her posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, was completed by her daughter Riley Keough and published after her death. It included personal details about her relationships, in her own voice, which makes Barr’s secondhand version land a little differently.
Why Roseanne Is Talking Now
Timing is rarely an accident in Hollywood. Barr gave The Hollywood Reporter interview while promoting her new self-financed TV show, Meemaw: A Modern Day Fable. At the time the interview was published, the pilot had not been picked up by any network.
Barr knows a thing or two about TV success. Her sitcom Roseanne ran on ABC from 1988 to 1997 and became a defining show of its era. The reboot, though, was cancelled in 2018 after Barr posted a tweet that was widely condemned as racist. Since then, she has largely operated outside the traditional network system, which brings us to Meemaw.
Nothing gets people talking quite like an eyebrow-raising quote about a pop legend, and Barr delivered several. Whether that buzz turns into network interest for her new project is another story entirely.
For now, the takeaway is simple. Roseanne Barr says Lisa Marie Presley considered Michael Jackson her number one, says Presley spilled on Nicolas Cage, and says she’s not making any of it up. Presley isn’t here to confirm or deny, and her own memoir remains the best place to hear her story in her words.
