Lady Gaga says she “suffered psychological difficulties” after spending a year and a half of her life in character for her role in the forthcoming House Of Gucci.
The Rain On Me singer plays Patrizia Reggiani – a socialite who had her fashion dynasty heir husband Maurizio Gucci murdered in a case that scandalised Italy –in Sir Ridley Scott’s new true crime drama.
House Of Gucci marks Gaga’s first film role since her Oscar-nominated turn in 2018’s A Star Is Born, and trailers have featured her speaking with an Italian accent, which the star says she used for nine months both on and off camera.
Speaking to British Vogue, cover star Gaga, who is of Italian descent and whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, revealed the lengths she went to for the part.
“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,” she told the magazine.
“Off camera, I never broke. I stayed with her. 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.”
Gaga, who stars in House Of Gucci alongside Adam Driver, Al Pacino, Jared Leto, Jeremy Irons and Salma Hayek, told Vogue she was so deep into the role she began to believe she was always on a film set.
The 35-year-old said: “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.
“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.”
Reggiani, a socialite and high-fashion personality, was convicted of orchestrating the 1995 assassination of Maurizio, the grandson of Gucci’s founder.
In an attempt to get the verdict overturned, her two daughters argued a brain tumour had affected her behaviour.
She was eventually freed in 2016.
Now 72, Reggiani reportedly told an Italian journalist she was upset Gaga had not attempted to meet her while preparing for the film.
Gaga told Vogue: “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 will arrive in UK cinemas on November 26.
The December issue of British Vogue is available via digital download and on newsstands from Friday 5 November. www.vogue.co.uk