“Father, son, and House of Gucci.” When Lady Gaga delivered that line in the first trailer for House of Gucci, fan anticipation for the movie reached a fever pitch.
Based on Sara Gay Forden‘s 2001 nonfiction book The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed, the movie depicts the events leading up to the murder of Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver). Maurizio was the grandson of Guccio Gucci, who founded the fashion house in 1921.
After fighting with several members of his family for control of the company, Maurizio became chairman of Gucci in 1989. The business suffered under his control, however, and by 1993, the family had lost control of the company.
While Maurizio was working to gain control of Gucci, his personal life was unraveling. In 1985, he told his wife, Patrizia Reggiani (Gaga), that he wanted to end their marriage after 13 years. When the couple finalized their divorce in 1994, he was ordered to pay his ex nearly $1.5 million per year in alimony.
Maurizio planned to marry again, this time to his longtime girlfriend, Paola Franchi, but he never got the chance. In March 1995, he was gunned down at age 46 by a hitman while on his way to work in Milan, Italy. Three years later, Reggiani was convicted of hiring the hitman to carry out the murder. She served 16 years in prison for the crime, but she still maintains she was wrongfully convicted.
“I wanted to make a real person out of Patrizia, not a caricature,” Gaga said during an October interview with the Wall Street Journal, noting that she spent months working on her Italian accent. “I felt the best way to honor Maurizio and Italians was for my performance to be authentic, from the perspective of a woman. Not an Italian American woman, but an Italian woman.”
Despite the Grammy winner’s commitment to her performance, Reggiani isn’t thrilled about the upcoming film.
“I am 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,” she told Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata in March. “It is not an economic question. I won’t get a cent from the film. It is a question of good sense and respect.”
The Gucci family isn’t happy either, telling the Associated Press in April that they are “truly disappointed” by the film. “They are stealing the identity of a family to make a profit, to increase the income of the Hollywood system,” Patrizia Gucci, one of Maurizio’s cousins, said at the time. “Our family has an identity, privacy. We can talk about everything, but there is a borderline that cannot be crossed.”
Meanwhile, Gaga and the rest of the cast are already generating Oscar buzz for their performances. The “Rain on Me” singer was previously nominated for Best Actress in 2019 for her role in A Star Is Born. (She won that year for Best Original Song.)
Keep scrolling for everything we know about House of Gucci:
In addition to Driver and Gaga, the cast is stacked with plenty of Oscar winners and nominees. Jeremy Irons stars as Maurizio's father, Rodolfo Gucci, while Jared Leto plays Paolo Gucci, one of his cousins. Al Pacino appears as Aldo Gucci, the uncle that Maurizio first went to work for when he started at the company. Salma Hayek stars as Giuseppina Auriemma, a psychic and friend of Reggiani's. Jack Huston plays Domenico De Sole, a Gucci executive who helped the family restructure the company in the 1980s. Reeve Carney stars as fashion designer Tom Ford, who served as creative director of Gucci from 1994 to 2004, and Camille Cottin plays Maurizio's girlfriend, Franchi. Shutterstock (3)
The film seems to be largely about the relationship between Maurizio and Reggiani, though it will cover the murder and its aftermath as well. Gaga was photographed on set in a wedding dress at one point, implying that the movie may feature a flashback to the duo's 1972 nuptials. Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Some members of Maurizio's family didn't approve of his marriage to Reggiani, whom they saw as a social climber. After the couple's marriage, Reggiani became a fixture of New York City high society. When they divorced, she was no longer supposed to use Gucci as her last name, but she did so anyway, saying, "I still feel like a Gucci." Maurizio's murder garnered a huge amount of attention in the Italian press, which nicknamed Reggiani the "Black Widow." Prosecutors alleged that she arranged the hit to gain control of her ex-husband's finances, in part because of his impending marriage to Franchi. When she first became eligible for parole in 2011, Italian media reported that she turned it down because she didn't want to work. “I’ve never worked in my life and I don’t intend to start now,” she said at the time. Metro Goldwyn Mayer
The Gucci family is upset about the movie, largely because they feel it delves too much into their private lives. They also don't think the casting is right, particularly in the cases of Pacino and Leto. “My grandfather was a very handsome man, like all the Guccis, and very tall, blue eyes and very elegant," Patrizia Gucci told the AP in April. "He is being played by Al Pacino, who is not very tall already, and this photo shows him as fat, short, with sideburns, really ugly. Shameful, because he doesn’t resemble him at all." She added that Leto's costume is "horrible." Courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures Inc
House of Gucci is set to hit theaters on Wednesday, November 24. Fabio Lovino/MGM and Universal
After Reggiani said she was "annoyed" by Gaga not reaching out to her ahead of filming, the performer admitted that she didn't want "anything that had an opinion" affecting her acting choices. "I only felt that I could truly do this story justice if I approached it with the eye of a curious woman who was interested in possessing a journalistic spirit so that I could read between the lines of what was happening in the film's scenes," the American Horror Story alum explained to British Vogue in their December 2021 issue. "Meaning that nobody was going to tell me who Patrizia [Reggiani] Gucci was. Not even Patrizia [Reggiani] Gucci." James Gourley/Shutterstock; Luca Bruno/AP/Shutterstock
In November 2021, the "Donatella" songstress told British Vogue that she spent so much time in character as Reggiani that she had some "psychological difficulty" toward the end of filming. “I was either in my hotel room, living and speaking as Reggiani, or I was on set, living and speaking as her," she told the outlet. "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. I thought I was on a movie set.” The singer also claimed that she "lived" as her character for a year and a half. "And I spoke with an accent for nine months of that," she added. “I never broke. I stayed with her.” Christopher Polk/AP/Shutterstock
"If I'm being honest, I do feel that it's been sensationalized that I worked on my accent for so long and that I was in character for so long," Gaga told The New York Times in November 2021 about the voice she created over the span of nine months for the role, never breaking character. "I think it would have done more of a number on me had I not practiced it so much. I would be talking like this with my mother, with friends, so that I, Stefani, could speak like this and it would be totally natural." She added, "It's like muscle memory, so that when you're in the scene, the accent is not in the way of the visceral quality of what's happening in the room. ... My approach to this was not different than my commitment to music. But I want to be clear: I don't think it's about sensationalizing method acting or being in character as the only way to do things. It would have been harder for me to go in and out of character on set than to stay in it." David Fisher/Shutterstock
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