An Oscar for Patrizia

Lady Gaga Wants Her Trophy

Already this Oscar season, Lady Gaga (born Stefani Germanotta) has regaled us with tales from the ‘House of Gucci’ production that convey her now legendary artistic dedication. That she had a registered psychiatric nurse on set in case things got too dark; that a crow, possibly the animal spirit of Patrizia Gucci, visited her the day of a climactic scene; that, above all, she “lived as Patrizia” for months, possibly years on end.

But with Academy Award nominations quickly approaching (Tuesday, February 8th!) the actress is running out of time to make a case for her performance efforts. Here, In a Hollywood Reporter EXCLUSIVE, Lady Gaga shares all the other ‘Gucci’ anecdotes she has yet to drop, but that you simply have to hear:

“A DOCUMENTARY”

You’ve heard a lot already about Gaga’s method acting, embodying the complicated Patrizia Gucci to the point that she wouldn’t answer to any name but “Patrizia” and eating exclusively Italian, period-appropriate food. What you might not know is this kind of in-depth role-play went two ways. Not only did Gaga demand that her costars also “experience life” as their characters (Leto was most game); she demanded it of the whole crew as well. Concocting an entire elaborate, alternate reality existence for them, she rechristened director Ridley Scott “Branzino Bonasera,” a Neapolitan documentary filmmaker. Craft services became “il Gelateria,” with gelato replacing Nature Valley bars. Gaga began referring to one gaffer, then everyone in the gaffing department, as “Giuseppe” — a “commoner name,” according to Gaga. Talk about commitment!

AN ANALOG EXISTENCE

Committed to experiencing life as Patrizia did, and therefore limited by period-specific detail, Gaga went without use of a cell phone for the duration of production. She accumulated, in her estimation, “like ten thousand missed texts” and says a number of her close friends are still pissed at her, “which made her feel even more like Patrizia.”

GUCCI GANG

Wanting to “understand the Gucci as much as the Patrizia,” Gaga took to drawing the double-G Gucci symbol everywhere she could. On bathroom stalls. On call sheets. Set decoration had to intervene a few times when she’d draw the symbol on, say, an ornate Italian desk. Eventually production hired someone to follow Gaga around, quietly erasing the symbols after she’d drawn them. 

“TIME TO TAKE OUT THE TRASH”

“When I first read the script and got to the line ‘it’s time to take out the trash’, I knew how much I needed to nail it. It’s a trailer line; it’s iconic. Ridley [Scott] understood how important the line was too, and I’m so grateful he gave me the leeway to really explore it in a less-than-traditional sense.” For three months, Gaga worked as a garbage woman in Rome. “I felt as though I were…beginning to understand ‘trash’ on a physical and emotional level.” While on the job, Gaga received two separate promotions, turning down the second out of fear she’d “never want to leave that world.” Scott says he thinks Gaga’s extracurricular work made the line “a little better, for sure.”

ON MOTHERHOOD

Gaga considered her biggest impediment to inhabiting Patrizia to be her own lack of mothering experience. “I’ve been a mother to all my Little Monsters,” Gaga says, “but not a mother in the, you know, biological sense.” Her first instincts were to get pregnant, with Adam Driver, but according to Gaga he “thought this was a bit much!” Instead she tried to adopt two girls. But when multiple agencies immediately nixed the idea, Gaga went a slightly different route: joining a mothering group on Facebook, posting under the fake name “Barbara Smith.” She was outed when another group member, noting how frequently her posts included lyrics to songs from “Chromatica,” asked if she was actually Lady Gaga. With the jig up, Gaga deleted her account, but not before hosting a mock funeral for Barbara. “I wanted to honor her,” says Gaga. “I lived as Barbara, while living as Patrizia, for months.”

NATIONAL PRIDE

Gaga takes great pride in her Italian heritage, but felt it was going to take something more to connect with a born Italian like Patrizia, to emote as someone “born in the Motherland.” Knowing she couldn’t do anything to actually change her birthplace of origin, Gaga decided to go a different route: training for, and hopefully representing, Team Italy at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. “It’s the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life,” says Gaga, who started training with the Italian National equestrian team. Ultimately she only made alternate, but Gaga says she’s “never felt more Italian.”

MAMBO ITALIANA

Deep into the shoot but still not “feeling Patrizia in her soul,” Gaga asked production if they had any contacts in the field of theoretical physics who might be able to help her build a time machine. Someone did, thankfully, and a crack scientific team aided Gaga in constructing a vessel that took her back to early 1960s Rome. Posing as a long-lost “Aunt Stefania,” Gaga ingratiated herself with the real Patrizia and spent three years getting to know her fake niece. “There’s really no substitute for the real thing,” says Gaga. Trouble with some local loan sharks finally propelled her back to 2021, but thankfully her time in mid-century Italy didn’t eat into production. Space-time conversion meant that Gaga’s three years were equivalent to only five minutes of present-day time. Gaga says she will “definitely” be using time-travel for her next project.

TO HELL AND BACK

“Patrizia’s life was a sort of hell for her and I wanted to feel that as much as possible, which is why I went to literal Hell for a month.” You might wonder how this is even possible, given her schedule and the fact that Hell is a metaphysical concept. She shrugs off the question. “The how isn’t important. What matters is that, under the punishing eye of Satan, I understood Patrizia in way I never could have reading a book, or talking to her, or even time-traveling. Going to Hell was the final puzzle piece.”