Lady Gaga’s Acting Process For House Of Gucci Is Super Intense

Lady Gaga - real name Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta - has revealed details of how she prepared for her role as Patrizia Reggiani in House of Gucci. The official trailer for the film dropped last week, sparking even more excitement for what is one of 2021’s most anticipated films. The singer will star alongside Star Wars actor Adam Driver, who will play Maurizio Gucci. Together, they portray how the turbulent marriage and divorce of Patrizia and Maurizio Gucci, the head of the Gucci fashion house, leads to murder.

The film will be Lady Gaga’s second leading film role. Her first, Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born, won her the Oscar for Best Original Song and garnered her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. And considering her wild process for getting in character, maybe House of Gucci will garner her the best actress win. Oscar fans are already placing their bets on her.

The actress gave her first in-depth interview on the experience of making House of Gucci to British Vogue, where she revealed just how Method she took things to play Reggiani, nailing her intricate accent, and the essence of the wicked 'black widow' (as the Italian press dubbed her.)

Reggiani is not exactly an easy character to play, considering her dark history. Reggiani and Gucci married in 1972, adopting a luxurious lifestyle and fashion house that made them famous, but separated in 1995 when Gucci left Reggiani for a younger woman. Reggiani’s response? Tasking a hitman with murdering her ex, who shot Gucci dead. Three years later, Reggiani was convicted of the crime in one of the most highly publicised trials in Italian history'

Gaga went so Method, she couldn’t even keep her own appearance while trying to play Reggiani, so she dyed her hair dark just like the Italian socialites. 'It was nearly impossible for me to speak in the accent as a blonde. I instantly had to dye my hair, and I started to live in a way whereby anything that I looked at, anything that I touched, I started to take notice of where and when I could see money.’

‘It is three years since I started working on it, and I will be fully honest and transparent: I lived as her for a year and a half. And I spoke with an accent for nine months of that,’ Gaga said. ‘Off-camera, too. I never broke. I stayed with her.’

Is Lady Gaga Italian?

A lot of fans pointed out that Lady Gaga is Italian, so it came as a surprise that the singer would need so much preparation to portray an Italian person. But Lady Gaga was born in New York and is American-Italian, rather than being directly European. So while she has an Italian flair to her accent and her ancestors are from Italy, she still needed to prepare.

Plus, as Gaga points out, Reggiani’s accent is very specific, and particular - speaking to a certain social class, location, attitude, and period.

But with Italian ancestry or not, Reggiani’s particular accent was difficult to pin down and Gaga was determined to nail it. So 9-month long Method acting as preparation, it was!

Gaga notes that in the movie, she changes Reggiani’s accent depending on who she’s speaking to, which she explains is something people in Italy would do to show their social class in certain situations, plus people naturally switch their accents a little depending on their environment. She explains ‘I started with a specific dialect from Vignola, then I started to work in the higher class way of speaking that would have been more appropriate in places like Milan and Florence,’ Gaga said.

She continued, saying ‘every minute of every day I thought of my ancestors in Italy, and what they had to do so that I could have a better life. I just wanted to make them proud, which is why I made the decision to make the performance about a real woman and not about the idea of a bad woman.’

But It Wasn’t All Fun

Gaga shared that the decision to live as Reggiani act for nine months caused her ‘great psychological difficulty at one point, towards the end of filming, and the extreme Method had an impact on her mental health. ‘I had some psychological difficulty at one point towards the end of filming. I was either in my hotel room, living and speaking as Reggiani, or I was on set, living and speaking as her,’ she said.

‘I remember I went out into Italy one day with a hat on to take a walk. I hadn’t taken a walk in about two months and I panicked. I thought I was on a movie set.’

Ultimately, Gaga went on to say that filming the movie was the ‘experience of a lifetime' despite the impact on her health. She described the process as ‘delicious madness’ and the inhabiting of Reggiani as ‘not an imitation, but a becoming.’

House of Gucci is in cinemas from 26 November