Method actor Lady Gaga used her House Of Gucci accent for nine months

Stefani “Lady Gaga” Germanotta is no stranger to the art of performance and drama, usually taking the form of meat suits and onstage faux deaths. However, she took it to new heights in preparation for her performance as H.B.I.C. Patrizia Gucci/Reggiani in Ridley Scott’s forthcoming House Of Gucci, diving into that method acting everyone’s always talking about.

In her pursuance of another Oscar nom, the actor/international pop star spent nine months speaking solely in her carefully crafted Italian accent. Her efforts so far have led to a truly delicious delivery of the line “Our name… sweetie,” but this is apparently just a taste of what’s to come in the mad fashion forward, crime-ridden feature.

“It is three years since I started working on it, and I will be fully honest and transparent: I lived as her [Reggiani] for a year and a half,” Gaga says in an interview with British Vogue. “And I spoke with an accent for nine months of that. I never broke. I stayed with her.”

In order to really capture the essence of Reggiani, Gaga felt she needed to make some changes on the outside as well. “I instantly had to dye my hair,” she says, because it was “nearly impossible … to speak in the accent as a blonde.”

Not only that, but she also got into photography as a way to get inside the mind of the hitman-hiring, social ladder-climbing socialite.

“I started to live in a way whereby anything that I looked at, anything that I touched, I started to take notice of where and when I could see money. I started to take photographs as well,” Gaga continues. “I have no evidence that Patrizia was a photographer, but I thought as an exercise, and finding her interests in life, that I would become a photographer, so I took my point-and-shoot camera everywhere that I went. I noticed that Patrizia loved beautiful things. If something wasn’t beautiful, I deleted it.”

House Of Gucci arrives in theaters on November 24.