Lady Gaga spoke with an Italian accent off-screen for nine months working on "House of Gucci ."- Gaga plays Patrizia Reggiani, ex-wife of the former
Gucci head Maurizio Gucci, in the drama.
Lady Gaga said she spoke in an Italian accent for almost a year while working on her role in the upcoming
The drama, out on November 26, tells the story of the 1995 murder of the former head of Gucci, Maurizio Gucci, by his ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani.
The movie is based on the 2001 book "The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed" by Sara Gay Forden. It stars Gaga as Reggiani, who spent 18 years in jail for plotting the murder and was released in 2016, alongside
The Grammy-winning singer opened up about playing the Italian socialite in a recent interview with British Vogue published on Tuesday.
"It is three years since I started working on it," she told the publication. "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."
Gaga continued that she "never broke" character and never dropped the Italian accent during that time, even off-camera.
She told British Vogue that she did more than just adopt an accent to play Reggiani. Gaga also dyed her hair darker, because it was "nearly impossible for me to speak in the accent as a blonde," and started reacting to things the way she believes Reggiani might have.
In fact, Gaga went so deep into becoming the character, she had trouble telling real life apart from the movie set.
"I had some psychological difficulty at one point towards the end of filming," she said. "I was either in my hotel room, living and speaking as Reggiani, or I was on set, living and speaking as her. I remember I went out into Italy one day with a hat on to take a walk. I hadn't taken a walk in about two months and I panicked."
Gaga told British Vogue that she started practicing speaking with an Italian accent by adopting a dialect commonly spoken in Vignola, a city in Northern Italy. She then moved on to a "higher class way of speaking that would have been more appropriate in places like Milan and Florence."
"In the movie, you'll hear that my accent is a little different depending on who I'm speaking to," Gaga said.
The "Star is Born" actress, who is of Italian-American heritage, said that while working on the film, she often thought about her "ancestors in Italy, and what they had to do so that I could have a better life."
She added: "I just wanted to make them proud, which is why I made the decision to make the performance about a real woman and not about the idea of a bad woman."