To prep for her role in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, Lady Gaga did a deep dive into the life Patrizia Reggiani.
The Oscar-winner devoured old interviews and “read everything that I could possibly find” about her character, the woman convicted of putting a hit out on her ex-husband, Gucci heir Maurizio Gucci, played in the MGM film by Adam Driver. But she stopped short of asking for a face-to-face meeting even though Reggiani is alive and free after being released from prison in 2016 following 18 years behind bars.
“I tried to find mostly the facts only, things that weren’t colored by any thinking so that I could form an opinion of my own,” Gaga said during a post-screening Q&A in Westwood on Nov. 4. “What I found was that when I watched her in interviews, I started to pick up on the nuances of when she was telling the truth and when she was lying. I thought, well, if I’m with her in person, she most certainly will lie and I most certainly will be nervous, or not, and be unable to tell.”
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Gaga added that she didn’t want anyone to tell her who Patrizia was “other than myself as well as my castmembers and my director,” as she was joined on the panel by Scott, Driver and Jared Leto. “It was important to me that I became not only curious but fascinated and fixated on what happened to this woman that she would make such a terrible mistake and that all these men in this family would come together and that they would be fighting over the money, over the power and the balance of wealth in an Italian family,” she explained. “I can’t possibly understand why any woman would try to infiltrate an Italian family business. My father owns a restaurant, and I would never try to engage in anything about business with my father.”
Many of Gaga’s comments centered on how she wanted to honor her Italian legacy by not portraying Reggiani as a “caricature,” by using research to supplement her own family history, as well as input from legendary crooner and close friend Tony Bennett.
“After I saw the film, I noticed the nuance. … [Patrizia] wants to belong and she does not. And, in a lot of ways, I relate to that, so I brought that part of myself to the character and I also found a way to assimilate backward — back from an Italian American to an Italian who wanted to survive, and no matter how much she tried to survive, she simply could not. And she failed,” noted Gaga, who also added that she modeled her accent on the northern part of the country (“It does not sound like a normal Italian accent”). “I love jazz, and Cole Porter says it’s nature, that’s all. This is Patrizia’s nature — she was simply too hurt and she did a bad, bad thing.”
As for Bennett, Gaga said he’s given a thumbs-down to films by a certain director. “He famously talks about his distaste for Marty Scorsese’s films,” she said as she touched the arm of Scott. “How much he dislikes the way that Italians are portrayed in crime. Tony does not fully talk to me about this right now [because of] the state that he’s in [with Alzheimer’s], which is probably best for me, but I’ve tried to explain it to him.”
No word on whether anybody has explained this to Scorsese, as the legendary auteur recorded a special 95th birthday greeting for Bennett that was posted to his Twitter account in August.
House of Gucci opens Nov. 24.
A version of this story first appeared in the Nov. 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
