Lady Gaga on 'House of Gucci' and Patrizia Reggiani: 'I did not feel the need to have her blessing'

Lady Gaga had the difficult task of portraying real-life "Black Widow" Patrizia Reggiani, responsible for orchestrating the murder of her ex-husband Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), for House of Gucci.

Last March, months before House of Gucci's Thanksgiving arrival, Reggiani told Italian news service ANSA that she was "rather annoyed at the fact that Lady Gaga is playing me in the new Ridley Scott film without having had the consideration and sensibility to come and meet me" (h/t E! News).

Gaga was asked about this for the new Deadline cover, and she didn't hold back in her response:

"I have to be honest; I don’t think that Patrizia’s blessing would’ve been meaningful to me. Because she did this reprehensible thing, and all the research that I did of her, I watched a lot of video footage of her and all of the footage of her after his death, and she is very clearly willing to speak of him as excessive and outrageous. Later in her life, after prison, she has this grandiose way of building herself up as this charismatic woman with lots of bravado; this powerhouse who had Maurizio Gucci murdered. She seems to me to possess this quality where she really wanted to drive the narrative of this famous story. And all of that to me was a total lie, and a total coverup for the pain that I knew was inside of her. And I’ve studied this very closely to get it right.

"So, I did not feel the need to have her blessing. I think the blessing that you need is when you are on a world stage—the way that I am very often—is that of the audience. And when the audience embraces you and trusts you to tell them a story, that’s the blessing that I need. Someone sitting in a seat in the theater and trusting me that I’m going to be expansive and thoughtful and loving and true. I don’t think the world has heard from her in a real way. So that’s why I wanted to play her in a real way. I did my best to get there."

Reggiani was convicted in 1998 for hiring a gunman to shoot and kill Gucci in March 1995. She served 18 years of her 26-year prison sentence before being released in 2016. 

House of Gucci charts three decades of behind-the-scenes "love, betrayal, decadence, revenge" after Reggiani married Maurizio, and Maurizio began climbing the rungs of his family business—the famed Italian fashion house. Al Pacino, Jared Leto, Jeremy Irons and Salma Hayek also star.

Read Gaga's full Deadline interview here.