Lady Gaga Details ‘House of Gucci’ Method Acting, Using Accent for 9 Months: ‘I Never Broke’
Zack Sharf
Last week’s “House of Gucci” official trailer premiere stirred up even more buzz for what is one of the year’s most anticipated films. The film is notable for being 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. Many Oscar pundits are watching closely to see if “Gucci” can bring Gaga back to the Academy Awards. The actress gave her first in-depth interview on the new film to British Vogue, where she revealed just how Method she went to play Patrizia Reggiani.
“It is three years since I started working on it, and I will be fully honest and transparent: I lived as her [Reggiani] 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.”
“It was nearly impossible for me to speak in the accent as a blonde,” Gaga continued. “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. I started to take photographs as well. I have no evidence that Patrizia was a photographer, but I thought as an exercise, and finding her interests in life, that I would become a photographer, so I took my point-and-shoot camera everywhere that I went. I noticed that Patrizia loved beautiful things. If something wasn’t beautiful, I deleted it.”
As for crafting Patrizia’s accent, Gaga said it was the first part of the role she started working on as soon as she agreed to star in the Ridley Scott-directed drama. “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. “In the movie, you’ll hear that my accent is a little different depending on who I’m speaking to.”
Gaga went on to call “Gucci” the “experience of a lifetime making…because 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.” The Oscar winner also revealed going Method resulted in 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,” Gaga 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.”
In response to the real Patrizia Reggiani calling her out for taking the role without consulting her, Gaga had this to say: “I only felt that I could truly do this story justice if I approached it with the eye of a curious woman who was interested in possessing a journalistic spirit so that I could read between the lines of what was happening in the film’s scenes. Meaning that nobody was going to tell me who Patrizia Gucci was. Not even Patrizia Gucci.”
“House of Gucci” opens November 24 through MGM’s distribution arm United Artists Releasing.
