Lady Gaga Went Full Method For “House Of Gucci”
Voting for Oscar nominations ends on February 1, 2022, so that gives Lady Gaga just three months to convince voters that she deserves a Best Actress nom for playing Patrizia Reggiani in Ridley Scott’s soon-to-be-released camp extravaganza House of Gucci. And in an interview with British Vogue, which stank so hard of Oscar-baiting that Leonardo DiCaprio could smell it underground like a truffle, Gaga said that she went full method when playing Patrizia Reggiani. Patrizia was the wife of Maurizio Gucci (played by Adam Driver) who went to prison for hiring a hitman to kill him. So… the Italian woman pretended to be… Italian? Or did Gaga just confess to having a boyfriend killed? Someone call the police!
House of Gucci also stars Al Pacino, Salma Hayek, Jeremy Irons, and Jared Leto. Yeah, Jared Leto. So the big story here is that the House of Gucci set didn’t combust from the insufferableness of two actors going full method. But Gaga tells British Vogue that she became Patrizia over the course of three years and put on Patrizia’s accent 24/7. .
“It is three years since I started working on it,” she launches in on House of Gucci, “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.” Off camera, too? “Off camera,” she confirms, solemnly. “I never broke. I stayed with her.”
And about that accent, which confused many ears, Gaga wants you (and by “you” I mean Oscar voters) to know that it’s VERY specific:
“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,” she explains. “In the movie, you’ll hear that my accent is a little different depending on who I’m speaking to.”
Gaga Day-Lewis also had to dye the blonde out of her hair because it was difficult for her to get into the accent while looking like Gaga:
“It was nearly impossible for me to speak in the accent as a blonde,” she continues. “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.”
And she went on:
“I had some psychological difficulty at one point towards the end of filming,” she explains, taking care with her words. “I was either in my hotel room, living and speaking as Reggiani, or I was on set, living and speaking as her. 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.” She could no longer compute the real world. “I thought I was on a movie set.”
Gaga also spoke with the Wall Street Journal about her work on the movie and how Tony Bennett actually also inspired the character. But she didn’t go full method and live like Tony Bennett for a few months to understand his perspective, she just knew already:
“I knew I was about to play a murderer. I also knew how Tony feels about Italians being represented in film in terms of crime. I wanted to make a real person out of Patrizia, not a caricature. I felt the best way to honor Maurizio and Italians was for my performance to be authentic, from the perspective of a woman. Not an Italian-American woman, but an Italian woman.”
Not, a caricature? Did we all see that James Bond-villain-ass white ski outfit? Come on now. And those wacky ass accents! The only way this movie could become more of a caricature would be if they cast Chris Pratt somehow.
Here’s more of Gaga in Vogue:
Pic: British Vogue