Lady Gaga spent more than a year trying to understand Patrizia Reggiani, the Italian socialite convicted of arranging the murder of her ex-husband Maurizio Gucci. There was, however, one rather obvious research method she deliberately avoided: actually meeting her.
The singer and actor, who plays Reggiani in Ridley Scott's House of Gucci, said she wanted to approach the character with what she described as a "journalistic spirit" rather than allow Reggiani herself — or anyone else's interpretation — to dictate the performance.
That decision did not particularly impress the real Reggiani.
Earlier in 2021, the 72-year-old told Italian news agency ANSA that she was "rather annoyed" Gaga had chosen to portray her "without having had the consideration and sensibility to come and meet me," calling it "a question of good sense and respect."
Gaga's response, in effect, was that meeting her would have defeated the point.
Gaga did not want Reggiani telling her who Reggiani was
Speaking to British Vogue ahead of the film's November 24 release, Gaga said she believed keeping her distance was necessary if she was going to reach her own conclusions about the woman at the centre of the story.
"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," she said.
"Meaning that nobody was going to tell me who Patrizia Gucci was. Not even Patrizia Gucci."
The distinction was important to Gaga because House of Gucci deals with events that have already accumulated decades of tabloid mythology, competing accounts and family drama.
The film follows the marriage and eventual rupture between Reggiani and Maurizio Gucci, an heir to the Gucci fashion dynasty played by Adam Driver. Maurizio was shot dead in Milan in 1995, several years after the couple's divorce.
Reggiani was convicted in 1998 of arranging his murder. She later served a prison sentence and has since been released.
Gaga said her goal was not to reproduce somebody else's judgment of Reggiani, including Reggiani's own carefully considered version of herself.
"I did my very best to play the truth," she told Vogue.
Her research stopped short of both a meeting and the book
Avoiding Reggiani did not mean Gaga avoided research. Quite the opposite.
She said she spent more than a year studying newspaper reports and recordings connected to Reggiani, including tapes in which Reggiani angrily spoke about her former husband. Gaga also took up photography as part of the process of constructing the character.
But she deliberately stayed away from another seemingly obvious source: Sara Gay Forden's 2000 book The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour and Greed, on which the movie is based.
"I did not want anything that had an opinion that would color my thinking in any way," Gaga said.
It is an unusual version of exhaustive preparation: consume enormous amounts of material, while carefully refusing some of the material most directly associated with the project.
For Gaga, the objective appears to have been less about reproducing Reggiani than building an interpretation from the evidence surrounding her.
She also said she wanted to avoid glamorising the crime at the centre of the film.
"I did not wish to glorify somebody that would commit murder," Gaga said, adding that she instead wanted to "pay respect to women throughout history who became experts at survival, and to the unfortunate consequences of hurt."
"I hope that women will watch this and remind themselves to think twice about the fact that hurt people hurt people. And it's dangerous."
Gaga's method acting went considerably further than the accent
If Gaga kept some distance from the real Reggiani, she did almost the opposite with the character.
The Italian-American performer, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, received the House of Gucci script after her starring role in 2018's A Star Is Born. She said she ultimately spent three years working on the project and lived as Reggiani for roughly a year and a half.
For nine months, Gaga spoke in the Italian accent she developed for the role whether cameras were running or not. She also dyed her blonde hair brunette as part of the transformation.
"I never broke. I stayed with her," she said.
That commitment went well beyond the accent that became an immediate talking point when trailers for the movie arrived.
Gaga said the process eventually became so consuming that she disconnected from friends and family and began struggling to separate her own life from the character she was playing.
"You end up sounding and looking like them, yes, but it's not an imitation, it's a becoming," she said.
That philosophy also explains why a personal encounter with Reggiani was not necessarily the missing piece Gaga's critics might assume it was. She was not trying to impersonate a living subject after receiving instructions from her; she was trying to build a version of Reggiani from the historical record and then remain inside it.
Reggiani saw the snub very differently
Reggiani's objection was more straightforward.
Speaking to ANSA in March 2021, she made clear that she welcomed having Gaga portray her but disliked the actor's decision not to make contact.
Her complaint turned the production's approach into a small drama of its own: one woman believed a meeting was a matter of respect, while the other believed avoiding it was essential to doing the job properly.
There was also an obvious practical complication. Reggiani is not merely the inspiration for a flamboyant fashion character. She is a woman convicted of arranging her former husband's killing, and Gaga said she remained conscious of the danger of turning that history into glamorous spectacle.
The actor's preparation therefore involved an awkward balance. She wanted to understand Reggiani deeply enough to portray her as a person rather than a caricature, while resisting anything she believed might turn the performance into advocacy, imitation or rehabilitation.
That left Reggiani outside the research process — despite being, inconveniently, Patrizia Reggiani.
Whether Gaga will ever meet her remains unresolved
Gaga did not rule out meeting Reggiani eventually, although she gave no indication that such a conversation was imminent.
Asked whether it might happen, she said she was not entirely sure.
"I think it requires a certain emotional quotient to be an actor," Gaga said. "The way I felt playing this character by the end, I realized that when you kill someone else, you really kill yourself."
For House of Gucci, the more immediate question is whether Gaga's self-imposed distance helped her find something closer to the truth or merely produced another interpretation of a woman who has already spent decades being interpreted by journalists, filmmakers and the public.
Reggiani wanted the chance to tell Gaga who she was. Gaga decided that was precisely the version she did not want handed to her.
