One does not simply walk on set and magically deliver the kind of performance that Lady Gaga serves up piping hot in House of Gucci. Sometimes playing a murderess takes nine lives.
To become Patrizia Gucci née Reggiani, the notorious social climber who rose through the ranks of the fashionable family and ultimately orchestrated her husband’s assassination, Gaga did a lot. She spoke in an Italian accent for nine months. She wore $10,000 worth of wigs that outperformed Jared Leto by a mile. She stirred an espresso cup with a tiny spoon that still haunts our dreams.
But it turns out that Gaga also went full feline to craft a purr-fect performance.
“I studied animals to play her,” the Oscar winner told Jake Gyllenhaal in a recent interview for Variety’s Actors on Actors series.
For the beginning of the film, Gaga noted that she studied a house cat. Recall that Patrizia is playful (and kinda creepy) about stalking her future husband Maurizio (Adam Driver) into a bookstore, pretending she likes to read. So far, this tracks.
Gaga went on to reveal that when Patrizia sees her uncle Aldo Gucci (Al Pacino) at the funeral for her father-in-law Rodolfo Gucci (Jeremy Irons), “she suddenly turns into a fox because she’s hunting now.”
Did the A Star Is Born Oscar winner observe how foxes hunt? Of course she did! “They’re really funny, because they hunt mice in the snow and they leap up and they burrow,” Gaga remarked of her mammalian inspiration.
“I actually did exercises in my hotel room where I would be the animal,” she went on. Gaga leaping off a king bed in heels and diving down into the covers? Yes, we can see it.
For the final portion of the film, when Patrizia hires hitmen to kill her husband, Gaga went full-on jungle predator. “The panther moves slowly,” she educated Gyllenhaal. “But then when it kills its prey, it is really violent and it’s really ugly, and then after, it cries.” (While Patrizia sheds some tears after she takes out her husband, we can’t say they seem to be especially remorseful.)
“I chose these animals as a way to map the physicality of the character,” Gaga explained. “What I feel in that moment is what she was feeling.”
Will we ever look at cats the same way again? Not likely. Will a fox stirring a tiny cup of espresso become a nightly fixture of our imaginations? Most definitely. Sweet dreams, little monsters.
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