Yahoo Autos How Lady Gaga Made Peace With Her Personal Demons To Play The “Black Widow” In ‘House Of Gucci’
Musical savant, fashion maven, provocateur, philanthropist. When multi-hyphenate Lady Gaga first added ‘leading actress’ to the list with 2018’s A Star is Born, she was Oscar-nominated. Now, she’s back with House of Gucci. Can Ridley Scott’s film cement her path as a major movie player? Antonia Blyth meets Gaga to dig into the real story behind the star.
In the Ridley Scott-directed House of Gucci, Lady Gaga plays Patrizia Reggiani, the notorious ‘black widow’ who had her husband Maurizio Gucci murdered. And much has been made of Gaga’s deep dive into Patrizia—the nine months spent speaking in her accent, the ‘cloud of black flies’ she felt followed her on set, the granular research she put in—but as a conceptual artist who has always created a 360-degree experience with her music and its videos, and with a personal style that transcends trends and leans towards performance art, could there be any other way than actually living as Patrizia? Certainly, everything Gaga does has taken a full-bodied approach, including the shoot for this piece. “We were able to create something that had artistic value and life to it,” she says of the picture. “I felt that the imagery was graphic, but also indicative of an artist, which is something that I care a lot about when I’m working. We’re not modeling, but we’re creating something that’s capturing a moment in time.”
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Here she discusses the potential pitfalls of her immersive method acting, whether she plans to direct a film and the surprising historical figure she’d love to play next.
DEADLINE: You’ve been compared to artists like David Bowie for taking a conceptual approach. Why did you feel that urgency to essentially become Patrizia for this film?
LADY GAGA: I don’t always know that the way that I express and articulate myself as an actor lands as close to home as it could. But the truth is, because I am such a conceptual artist, like you said, and I really inhabit my creations, it is almost entirely impossible for me to imagine being an actor in any other way than this. I’m inside of a world, and it’s like altering your reality in order to get to at the truth.
Patrizia had her own reality, and it’s not mine. So, in order to find her truth, I have to turn the knobs in my brain, my heart and my body, and I have to find the similarities between us and live it. When I’m able to live it, I feel that I can then uncover the truth of her humanity, which is that she is a killer, but at one point she wasn’t. She also was a child before she was the Patrizia that we see in the film.
So, this immersive process that I go through is something that endlessly gives to me. It’s a way for me to learn about people. And especially playing a real person, it was really essential for me to stay inside that and discover her.
Fabio Lovino/MGM
DEADLINE: Being that empathic is quite a dangerous place to live. You’ve been very open about your mental health struggles. Does it feel risky to give so much of yourself to your work?
GAGA: It’s definitely my way. I’ve definitely lived life on the edge of art. I think that when you fully sacrifice yourself to art, there’s a real transformation that can take place where you’re able to touch painful things about yourself. I think otherwise you may not go to that place inside you, because it’s so painful. But in art, in a movie, you’re asked to embrace the pieces of yourself that are undoubtedly survival mechanisms, perspectives, childhood trauma, child brain versus adult brain.
All of your life experiences become something that’s inside of a library, and it is a dangerous process to go into that library to work. Anyone can read lines and dress up. But to put your entire library into a character, I think is more the way that I like to work, because I know that I’m using all my books and I don’t use the books I don’t need. There are some books in my library that are not Patrizia, but there are so many that are.
I think it allows for me to tell the story of Patrizia not just in the way the world—or in the way Italy—saw her, but in the way that they saw her. Meaning, the story of many women all over the world who age and get disposed of who try to be advisors to men and get pushed down and told that they don’t belong.
DEADLINE: How did you personally relate to that to play Patrizia, the way women are disposed of?
GAGA: What part of us as women, when we’re sent into that blind rage, is activated? I believe it’s the part of us that’s protecting the little girl inside of us, and saying, “When I was young, I didn’t know this would happen. When I was young, I was taught to be beautiful to matter; I was taught that I needed a man to get down on one knee for me to matter; I was taught that if I married someone successful, that I would be a good woman. And I’m now being taught that none of these things matter. I’m now learning that this is all one big giant gaslight. And I’m protecting that little girl.”
DEADLINE: As a woman in her 30s, you’ve had these moments of, “Wait a minute, I’ve been duped,” right?
Josh Telles/Deadline
GAGA: I think that it’s something I relate to deeply, certainly on a personal level. I often say women are gaslit since birth. But I think it’s something a lot of women share in common, this fear of, “Well, if I’m over 30 and I’m not married, or if I lose my looks at this time, then I’m not going to work anymore.” Or, as an actress in this industry, “My face has to be frozen in time in order to get a job.” Everything from being in the entertainment industry as well as just being a woman in the world has informed my opinion on this, and I think a lot of women can relate to that. Or the women that I’m close with, the community that I connect to.
I think also there’s this idea that radical love is valuable and that it’s painful to lose that. To feel that your whole life you had a vision for life, and to have it taken away from you because someone says you saw it wrong. And you say, “But I saw it because you taught it to me that way. I grew up in a man’s world and you taught me to see things this way, and now you’re taking it from me because I see it that way.”
DEADLINE: Ridley Scott approached you for this not long after A Star Is Born. You’ve always wanted to be an actress first and foremost, even before your music. How did you handle the pressure of finally having the dream come true in this way?
GAGA: I think that the pressure that I always feel is internal. It has less to do with the nature of the project and more to do with: does this project have heart? And so, I didn’t feel pressure in any other way than to show up as a professional and do my job as the leading actress.
I think being the leader of something is important, and showing up to set prepared, knowing the way that he shoots, learning about the way that he shoots. He’s an architect, the way he sets up the cameras. And sometimes there’s rehearsal, sometimes there isn’t, and he moves [the camera] with a lot of momentum.
But when we met each other, I knew, because he said to me, “She really loved him, and he really loved her. They were really in love.” When he said that to me, I knew it would be a story that was complicated and wild and unassuming, and that it would have a ferocious nature to it in the way that it would be told, unlike the way it had been told before.
DEADLINE: The story challenges the idea that Patrizia is just some so-called ‘crazy’ woman who went off the deep end.
GAGA: I’m grateful to Ridley that he celebrated a performance that challenges that notion. Patriarchy is dangerous also for the men, because they are so toxic in this family and business system that they’re fighting over Gucci; fighting over money and privilege. They are blind to the indelible abuse and fight that they’ve put this woman through, as she’s tried to just simply belong.
So, there was a related story, where it was not about a killer that was born a killer and was just using her body her whole life to put herself in some circumstance where she would end up rich. Rather, she believed she was doing what was best and was doing what she needed to do to survive.
These patriarchal systems, they are ultimately poison, and the men were poisoned, too. So, I appreciate that Ridley allowed me to tell that story.
I think being immersive allows you to look at your life and look at what you want to say and put it into a performance that’s then bigger than me, bigger than Patrizia, bigger than the movie. It’s about the world.
DEADLINE: I was interviewing Maggie Gyllenhaal the other day, about her film The Lost Daughter. She was talking about how there’s this trope in cinema, where people love to see a woman go ‘crazy’. Her film is about a woman that does something objectively terrible—she leaves her children—just as Patrizia does something objectively terrible here. But these stories are nuanced. Patrizia is this passionate, intelligent woman who feels things so deeply. Obviously, it’s not a simple case of she didn’t get what she wanted so she killed him.
GAGA: No, it’s actually the opposite in a way. She did get what she wanted. She just lost everything she loved.
The decision to play her as a passionate woman came from ethnicity and the culture of being Italian. I mean, I’m Italian-American, I come from a long lineage of Italians. And Italians are passionate, vibrant people. To Americans, who might go to Rome and hear women yelling in the piazza at each other, they would hear them as yelling when they’re simply just speaking to each other. There’s something about the way when you’re speaking to each other, it sounds like you’re yelling, but really, it’s your culture, it’s your ethnicity. It’s the culture of grind, of hard work, of the celebration of family and love. So, to me, that type of animal had to be inside of her.
When Patrizia married Maurizio, he was not rich, and when he was murdered, they were divorced. So, there was never a moment that it was only the money. So, that realness, that vibrancy, the passion…
DEADLINE: And yet people still love to apply these labels to her, like ‘crazy’, ‘gold digger’, and so on.
GAGA: People do love to watch women fall apart. But they love to watch women fall apart on film and in television. When women fall apart in real life and are vibrant and passionate, we’re called crazy. We’re called bitches. We’re told we’re too much.
I’ve been called ‘spicy’ before. I really disliked that, spicy. It’s like, what is the flavor of a woman? Patrizia’s flavor was her DNA and it was a product of her upbringing. It was also the product of being incessantly put down by this system of men.
What I always wanted was to portray her in the way that I believed, which is that she has true and real regret at this point in her life. That she regrets this murder. In order to figure out why she did it, I had to track it all the way through the lens of survival. Survival as a woman, I think, is a very complex narrative, and I tried to weave the story of many through her.
DEADLINE: Her pain was painful to watch. Like when she tries to give him the photo album to inspire him to return home to his family.
GAGA: Thank you. I appreciate you saying that, because I really felt it deeply.
Fabio Lovino/MGM
DEADLINE: All the immersive preparation and studying you did for this role—the year and a half you spent living as Patrizia, speaking and moving like her, watching videos of her—Jessica Tandy and Kathy Bates used to call that their ‘kitchen work’. Meaning, it was like chopping the vegetables for the soup.
GAGA: I think that’s a beautiful metaphor. What I like about it is there’s a gentleness to it that I think is often not associated with method acting. In a way, there was not always a gentleness to the way I played Patrizia. But this idea—this sort of meditative process of making a really good soup and the alchemy of being the chemist in the kitchen—this is exactly [what it is]. I love Kathy. I worked with her on American Horror Story. That metaphor really resonates with me.
The way that I used to describe the way I worked on this to people is, I put all of the ingredients into a cauldron; I put in the biography of her that I’ve written, I put in the accent, I put in the script, I put in all of the traumas, I dig through my own library, I contribute my stories. And then I drink the soup. I study the animal. And then I show up on set and Ridley yells action—or Ray [Raymond Kirk], our AD, yells action—and I throw it all out the window and just talk to the actor.
DEADLINE: When you were deep into your method and sense memory work on set, and you were faced with Adam Driver as Maurizio off-camera, how did you react to him?
GAGA: I faced a wide spectrum of emotions all the time, and it spanned across all the characters that I worked with. It was wild and free and exploratory and completely immersive. And because I had consent from my fellow actors, and because we had mutual consent and professionalism and trust, we were able to freely immerse ourselves in this space. I didn’t feel in any way that I had to curtail or edit my work for any other actor.
