She’s wearing “a dusty rose T-shirt” she shrugs, from where precisely she cannot be sure, with black leggings. “This is a necklace from my boyfriend, from a beautiful artisanal shop in San Francisco, as well as these earrings,” she says. Her mother, Cynthia, is coming for tea later, and she’s in a mellow mid-afternoon mood. She’s pulled two long strands of honey-brunette hair from her bun, and they’re hanging over her exquisitely made-up face, the whole experience adding up to a sort of heightened drama-student effect. The artist in repose, if you will.
It makes sense. “It is three years since I started working on it,” she launches in on House of Gucci, “and I will be fully honest and transparent: I lived as her [Reggiani] for a year and a half. And I spoke with an accent for nine months of that.” Off camera, too? “Off camera,” she confirms, solemnly. “I never broke. I stayed with her.”
“It was nearly impossible for me to speak in the accent as a blonde,” she continues. “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. I started to take photographs as well. I have no evidence that Patrizia was a photographer, but I thought as an exercise, and finding her interests in life, that I would become a photographer, so I took my point-and-shoot camera everywhere that I went. I noticed that Patrizia loved beautiful things. If something wasn’t beautiful, I deleted it.”
Gaga says that had life not gone the way of meat dresses and stadium tours, she might have liked to be a reporter, and it was an artist-cum-journalist’s approach that she took to piecing together Reggiani for herself. (Reggiani, it should be noted, is still very much alive, residing in Milan and perfectly capable of talking to the press herself. She is reportedly pleased such a marquee name is to play her, although – self-aggrandisement undimmed by having served 18 years of a 26-year prison sentence for having her ex-husband killed – told an Italian journalist earlier this summer, “I am quite annoyed by the fact that Lady Gaga is playing me in the new Ridley Scott film without even having the foresight and sensitivity to come and meet me.”)
