Lady Gaga on drawing from real-life trauma for House Of Gucci performance

Published

3 years ago

November 17, 2021

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“For me, it’s real,” Lady Gaga tells Sky News. “There are a lot of things that I’ve been through in my life, traumatic experiences, that I drew upon to play Patrizia.”

The star is talking about Patrizia Reggiani, the Italian socialite convicted of hiring a hitman to assassinate her ex-husband and fashion powerhouse Maurizio Gucci, whom she is playing in the new House Of Gucci film – currently making headlines as its stars attend premieres and promo events in an array of fabulous outfits around the world.

I’d waited to speak to her in a virtual waiting room on Zoom, two days after the UK premiere for the film. The star is running “a bit late” – 40 minutes – but when the reason is due to outfit changes, it’s hard to complain. This is Lady Gaga, after all.

When she does pop up on my screen, dressed in a pastel blue suit, off-camera she sounds tired but insists she’s happy to do the rounds with journalists to speak about the film, which is based on the true story of the family-run Gucci fashion empire. “I can’t wait for the world to see it,” she says. “We’ve had the worst 18 months, it’s time for the world to come together and watch movies!”

It’s been more than 10 years since Stefani Germanotta rose to fame as Lady Gaga and almost instantly cemented herself as one of the biggest – and most eccentrically-dressed – pop stars in the world, firing out hit after hit after hit; from Just Dance and Poker Face, to Paparazzi and Bad Romance, to Alejandro and Born This Way.

Since then, she has proved there are even more strings to her bow, including her talents as an actress; in 2018, she won critical acclaim for A Star Is Born, giving a raw, emotional performance that saw her nominated for the Oscar for best actress (and winning the award for best original song) the following year.

When she speaks about House Of Gucci, though, in which she stars opposite Adam Driver, it’s clear that Reggiani is one of her most emotionally challenging roles to date. “I was so broken at the end,” she says. “I feel like I’m reliving the technique of the process of building this film every day when I speak to you about it.”

Lady Gaga, of course, has a reputation for taking whatever she does very seriously (it takes some nerve to walk the red carpet in a meat dress, don’t you know?) and for House Of Gucci, she embraced method acting.

“I was in character for six months leading up to the film, and then for the three-and-a-half months that we filmed. I began with my accents, I would spend a lot of time talking to my family and everybody in my life to learn how to naturally speak with [the Italian] accent without it driving the acting.”

Did that not drive your family a bit… mad? I ask tentatively.

She laughs: “I think my mom actually really liked it. She’s always embraced this artistic side of me, ever since I was a little girl. My father would laugh. I drove some people crazy, of course, but you know, I’m like a child with art and I love to immerse myself.”

So serious is Lady Gaga about this role that when I bring up being envious of her imagination, she’s keen to stress that what we see on screen isn’t fully acting. The singer, who has previously spoken out about being raped by a male music producer when she was 19, tells me she directed past trauma into making the role feel real.

“I think I’m just like everybody else really,” she says. “I’m imagining, sure. I’m creative, sure. But I think that being imaginative comes from a real place, it’s just how you choose to synthesise who you are.

“When I think about my real life experiences, there was a lot of things that I’ve been through in my life, traumatic experiences, that I drew upon to play Patrizia, and it’s not necessarily imaginative in that way. I mean I’m calling upon myself. Now, it might be imaginative to you, you might see it and say ‘oh that looks like it possesses imagination’, but for me it’s not imaginative, it’s real.”

Gaga says the film (which is set mostly in Italy) has made her reflect on her Italian-American roots and just how far she has come since the start of her career. “I’m really grateful… my family worked so hard on the soil where we filmed so that I could have a better life, and here I am starring in a Ridley Scott film,” she says.

Strip away the costumes and wigs and the singer certainly brings an equally gripping intensity to the filmmaker’s latest work.

“I felt so empowered as a woman on set with mostly men and I felt loved,” she says. “He’s an absolute legend and he’s masterful at what he does. His process is like an architect, he describes the script as the blueprint.”

And as for the fact that the script is based on true events…

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She laughs: “To say that the Guccis were complicated would be a massive understatement. It’s amazing, you know, how you say things like, ‘you can’t make this up’. The truth about this whole story is you watch it and it’s actually unbelievable that it’s true.”

Reggiani, who is currently in prison, was convicted in 1998 of hiring a hitman to kill her husband.

“I have no interest in trying to make a case for why this should have happened,” Gaga says. “I don’t believe this should have happened, it’s reprehensible, it’s horrible… when this murder took place, I believe it happened because she was so traumatised, so hurt, that she made a terrible, awful mistake that she deeply regrets.”

Was the emotional exhaustion Lady Gaga suffered bringing Reggiani’s story to the screen worth it? Audiences will get to find out when House of Gucci comes out in cinemas on 26 November.

Entertainment

‘Music is back’ as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales

Published

2 hours ago

January 8, 2025

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'Music is back' as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales

UK music sales hit a 20-year high of £2.4bn in 2024, helped by pop megastar Taylor Swift’s latest album, and driven by streaming and the vinyl revival, figures show.

Revenues from recorded music reached an all-time high, more even than at the peak of the CD era, according to annual figures from the digital entertainment and retail association ERA.

Total consumer spending on recorded music – both subscriptions and purchases – topped the previous record of £2.2bn in 2001, ERA said.

Takings from streaming services including Spotify, YouTube Music, and Amazon rose by 7.8% to a little over £2bn.

Almost £200m was spent on vinyl albums, an annual uplift of 10.5%, while CD album revenues were flat at just over £126m.

Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department was the biggest-selling album of the year, aided by her record-smashing worldwide Eras tour.

More than 783,000 copies were bought, nearly 112,000 of them on vinyl – making it 2024’s biggest-selling vinyl album.

The biggest single of the year was Noah Kahan’s Stick Season, generating the equivalent of 1.99 million sales.

ERA chief executive Kim Bayley said 2024 was “a banner year for music, with streaming and vinyl taking the sector to all-time-high records in both value and volume.

Ms Bayley called it the “stunning culmination of music’s comeback which has seen sales more than double since their low point in 2013. We can now say definitively – music is back.”

Despite the increasingly strong performance by the British music industry, artists are said to be receiving less money.

Experts have said the musicians make less than people would think because of the role of streaming – platforms do not normally pay artists directly and divide any owed payments among the rights holders of songs.

Music revenues grew by 7.4% in 2024, while video rose by 6.9%, and games fell by 4.4%, according to preliminary figures.

Subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV grew by 8.3% to £4.5bn – almost 90% of the sector’s revenues.

Deadpool & Wolverine was the biggest-selling title of the year, with sales of 561,917 – more than 80% of them sold digitally.

Despite the games sector’s 4.4% decline last year, it remains nearly twice as large as the recorded music business.

Full game sales saw a drop-off with PC download-to-own down 5%, digital console games down 15% and boxed physical games down 35%, in favour of subscription models which grew by 12%.

EA Sports FC 25 – formerly known as Fifa was once again the biggest-selling game of the year, generating 2.9 million unit sales, 80% of them as digital formats.

Entertainment

Kieran Culkin on receiving notes from Jesse Eisenberg on A Real Pain: ‘I’d automatically get defensive’

Published

11 hours ago

January 8, 2025

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Kieran Culkin on receiving notes from Jesse Eisenberg on A Real Pain: 'I'd automatically get defensive'

Kieran Culkin says he doesn’t care if his projects get badly reviewed as long as he enjoyed himself doing them.

The 42-year-old recently won best supporting actor in a motion picture at the Golden Globes for his performance in A Real Pain.

He tells Sky News he isn’t dependent on positive feedback, but it is “cool” when people find a connection to his work.

“I’m doing this [acting] around 36 years. I’ve been sort of trained or whatever, conditioned, to just not care what an audience response is to something,” he says.

“I’ve been in plays that I think ‘this is bad, but I’m enjoying it’. I don’t really care or if it gets poorly reviewed, I don’t really care. So I still sort of have that mentality but it’s actually quite nice that people are connecting with [A Real Pain]. To hear people that have seen it say, I know a guy like Benji or talk about him, it’s like that’s what this feeling is”.

The Succession actor stars alongside Jesse Eisenberg in the film about cousins who take a trip to Poland to see the country their grandmother left.

Culkin says taking notes from a co-star, who also wrote and directed the film, was a new and challenging experience.

“That’s tough; it just is,” he says.

“[Jesse] would give me a note, my chest would puff up and I would automatically get really defensive, like, I’m gonna hit this guy.”

‘The biggest taboo on a movie’

Eisenberg says playing the role and being the filmmaker made him “nervous” because he sees actors giving notes to be the “biggest taboo on a movie”.

“You don’t give an actor notes – never do that. You can commit arson on a movie set before you can give an actor notes,” he says.

A Real Pain is set in Poland and is inspired by a real-life trip Eisenberg took with his now wife Anna Strout more than 20 years ago to retrace his family’s roots.

“Had the war not happened, this is where I would be living,” he says – and so looking at Poland and its history became a huge inspiration to him.

The Now You See Me actor first wrote a play, The Revisionist, which debuted off-Broadway in 2013, and spent the decade redeveloping it to become the “buddy road trip” A Real Pain.

‘It’s this beautiful, warm, welcoming country’

The film weaves through the story of cousins reconnecting on their journey to visit, for the first time, their grandmother’s home before she was displaced during the Holocaust.

Eisenberg is currently in the process of gaining Polish citizenship and says his relationship with the country has changed over the years.

He says: “With Polish heritage, you grow up hearing that it was the site of the murder of all of your family and you hear that it’s bleak and especially if you’re a kid of the 80s and 90s like I am, you hear about bread lines from the Soviet era. And so going there was just unbelievably the polar opposite of what I had heard growing up.

“It’s this beautiful, warm, welcoming country and not only beautiful, warm and welcoming, but like what they did for me and allowed me to do, to tell my family’s story, to be able to shoot at a concentration camp, to be able to shoot on this very hallowed grounds of the various locations we were on was just amazing. I’m in such debt to them.”

‘I grew up knowing performance was normal’

A Real Pain looks at how a person’s family history can shape who they become.

Eisenberg says growing up with a mother who worked as a birthday party clown helped him see acting as an attainable career.

He says: “Every morning I saw this woman get dressed up in a ridiculous outfit and put on crazy face makeup and tune her guitar to the piano. So, I grew up knowing that performance was normal.

“I didn’t grow up thinking that people who perform are weird and actors are weird and why do they? You know, I grew up thinking to behave in this silly way can be a professional job.

“So it just stayed in me. And now what we do is kind of ridiculous, but we take it seriously.”

A Real Pain is in cinemas now.

Entertainment

‘Music is back’ as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales

Published

14 hours ago