Lady Gaga Now

This week’s cover of The Hollywood Reporter has been revealed, featuring a stunningly wicked Lady Gaga in support of her new film House of Gucci.

Lady Gaga by AD + DM for THR

You can read an extract from the interview below.

[...] One day while shooting a scene with Salma Hayek, who plays Patrizia's confidant, Gaga was laying on a couch rely- ing on a Stanislavski acting technique (in which she would run through sense memories from an emotional event) when the line between her own experiences and Patrizia's began to blur. "It's a scene where I knock a lit candle across the room, and I remember I gave Salma a heart attack that day, " Gaga says. "I was falling apart as (Patrizia) fell apart. When I say that I didn't break character, some of it was not by choice." Gaga had experienced this kind of dissociative state before - including once when she was hospitalized. On the Gucci set, Scott intervened, concerned by the impact the performance seemed to be having on his leading actress. "Ridley said, 'I don't want you traumatiz- ing yourself,'" Gaga says. "And I said, 'I already have. I've already been through this anyway. I might as well give it to you.' And he said, 'Well, leave it here and don't do this to yourself anymore.' [...] "I took the pain I feel from being attacked when I was a young girl, from feeling left behind by people that I love, from feeling trapped that I can't go out into a world that I love," Gaga says. "I took that pain and I gave it to her." Her House of Gucci performance is one that will cement Gaga's place not as a singer who acts, but as an actress full stop, and confirm that her Oscar nomination for 2019's A Star Is Born was no fluke.

After seeing A Star Is Born, Scott wanted Gaga for House of Gucci and quickly set up a meeting. "There was only one person ever in my sights at this moment in time who could carry this pretty forthright woman, [...] I found Stef to be inordinately approachable and, frankly, a lot of fun. She's very smart and very, very perceptive. I knew after that first meeting, it was essential that she would do this part. She must. And, of course, because of her very recent success [in A Star Is Born], that made it a lot easier for us to get going and get a proper budget." (The movie cost more than $75 million.)

Lady Gaga by AD + DM for THR

Gaga sees Patrizia as a performance of a lifetime "meaning I put my entire lifetime into her" - and a cautionary tale about what happens to a woman who has been taught that all of her value is in the man whom she marries. In a scene where a family attorney serves Patrizia divorce papers at her daughter's school, "I yelled at him for every woman on earth, the way that we all do," she says. "As a woman, I feel like I really can snap into something that's not about the person that I'm yelling at. It's like I'm yell- ing at all the men that came before them. It doesn't make it right, but it's real."

Her interpretation of Patrizia is a femi- nist one - that what drove a woman to murder was going unseen and unheard by the men around her. "I can assure you, you should never put a hit out on your husband," Gaga says. "But my love and best wishes and my heart go out to all of us women who try to survive and matter in a man's world. While lots of men were trying to figure out what piece of this pie they were going to get to keep, while they were watching the money, they should have been watching her. And because they didn't pay attention to her, they lost everything."

[...] "My mother and father met me as Patrizia a couple times," Gaga says. "And they were mostly laughing because my family gets a kick out of my love of artistry... There's a downside to committing yourself to a role in that way because it's an adjustment for everybody around you. Suddenly, you're not talking to Stefani anymore with an accent. You're talking to Patrizia Gucci." Hayek praises the end result, "the fresh ness of [Gaga's] performance and creativity in her choices.'" She was the ultimate professional," Hayek says.

Lady Gaga by AD + DM for THR

On most days during the three-and-a-half-month production, Gaga woke up around 3 a.m. to begin her transformation, a process that included donning a prosthetic bald cap under her various wigs. Often after she awoke she vomited, from some mixture of "anxiety, fatigue, trauma, exhaustion, commitment and love," she says. "You wake up, you throw up, you go to set, throw up again."

As British costume designer Janty Yates details, "Ridley [Scott] wanted Lady Gaga to look more like Gina Lollobrigida than Joan Collins of Dynasty, so basically we looked at all the photos of Gina in her prime in the '60s, and I did a later-'70s version of the lace dress." (To create the outfit, the costume team's hand cutter Dominic Young individually applied every piece of lace.)

In May of 2020, during the dark early months of the pandemic, Gaga released the house music-inspired Chromatica, her sixth consecutive No. 1 album. Though still a hit, it sold only a fraction of her early dance music albums, like 2009's The Fame and 2011's Born This Way. She attributes some of that to the moment, a time when people were scared and secluded at home, not out dancing in clubs. "[The early pandemic] was a time where enter- tainment was, in a way, so needed," Gaga says. "But also we just were not fully in the place to receive that. And I think that that's OK. Sometimes the world is just not in a place to be able to take in art and have it feel good." Gaga says she struggled with depression while making Chromatica. "That album was so difficult," she says. "Almost every day that I went into the studio, I didn't want to be there. When I went into the studio, I used to say, 'I'm so depressed on a clinical deep level, and I do not want to create anything. I'm not entertained right now.' ... During that time, that music did not make me happy, entertainment did not make me happy, performing did not make me happy."

Lady Gaga by AD + DM for THR

[...] Gaga has now sung on the Oscars stage three times and twice at the Super Bowl (including as the halftime per- former), but 2021 brought a performance with a new kind of stakes for her - the inauguration, which happened two weeks after the attack on the Capitol and in a month when 3,135 Americans were dying per day from COVID-19. "I had to speak to the country and the world in a different way,' she says. "For that performance, it was through Stefani, meaning myself. And in the world that all went through the last four years together, with Donald Trump. In a lot of ways, I thought to myself, 'How could I possibly be patri- otic?' I remember thinking that we were at war. And this was a war song. Singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" 5 feet from Mike Pence, 4 feet from George W. Bush, 10 feet from the president-elect, I really realized while I was up there, Oh, that's right. Not everything is like Donald Trump. We can all be seated in the same place together and be civilized and move forward.' And I found peace in that. I found that to be orderly. Kindness can be orderly."

Lady Gaga by AD + DM for THR

You can read the full interview on hollywoodreporter.com

Part of this article originally appeared on the November issue by The Hollywood Reporter.