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With “House of Gucci,” director Ridley Scott has built an epic drama of love, family ties that bind, creative inspiration for haute couture, and murder. Gucci family members are brought to three-dimensional life with charismatic and award-winning performances from Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Jeremy Irons, and Al Pacino; orbiting the main cast in telling character roles are the talented Salma Hayek, Jack Huston, and Camille Cottin.
Although the “House of Gucci” screenplay is based on real-life events, research can only take a performer’s portrayal so far. Much depends on being open to creative collaboration, and in this instance, Scott’s track record for guiding actors towards celebrated performances (“Gladiator,” “Thelma & Louise,” “All the Money in the World”) encouraged the ensemble to lean in. “He’s got the technical piece worked out so perfectly that it’s like giving a bird wings to fly,” says Lady Gaga. “It’s a real freedom and gift to get from your director.”
In building Patrizia Reggiani’s two-decade trajectory from middle-class trucking-business striver to upper-crust Gucci empire-builder to woman scorned, Lady Gaga stayed in character for the duration of the film shoot. Initially grounded and spontaneous, Patrizia becomes increasingly calculated and vengeful. “There was always something a little off about Patrizia,” comments Gaga. Looking to empathize with the real-life, fraying wife and mother she was portraying, she says, “What I found fascinating was that the line was thin between her humanity and any other woman’s humanity—meaning any other woman might have felt like her.”
Patrizia’s navigation of the Guccis’ web of succession eventually comes at great cost to her own equilibrium, and at a fatal cost to her marriage with Maurizio Gucci, played with both nurturing warmth and withholding reserve by Adam Driver. (Gaga praises Driver as someone she “got to learn from every day.” In turn, acting opposite her, Jeremy Irons—cast as ailing Gucci elder Rodolfo, father of Maurizio—found Gaga to be “all you could want from an acting partner, and more.”)
With Oscar-winning costume designer (and longtime Scott collaborator) Janty Yates dressing the players, the classical acting technique of building a character from the outside in proved essential for the “House of Gucci” cast. Perhaps no actor took this more to heart than Jared Leto as Paolo Gucci, the family’s approval-seeking black sheep.
In researching the part Leto, who’s no stranger to bringing true-life figures to the screen, notes that “you become like a detective, and you find the things that stoke your imagination and put you on the path to creating a character: a real person.” While Leto could locate only a small amount of archived footage, he honed in on how Paolo “always had a little wink, a little smile in his eyes.” Parlaying his performance into a Puckish realm, Leto embraced Paolo’s sartorial unconventionality. He worked diligently with Oscar-nominated make-up designer Göran Lundström to embody Paolo’s fleshy middle age and relished partnering with Al Pacino, who portrays Paolo’s exasperated yet devoted father Aldo.
Movie lovers around the world have been riveted by the spectacle of an iconic fashion dynasty driven by desire, ego, greed, and insecurity. As orchestrated by the on-screen worlds-builder and an actors’ director that is Scott, the brilliant “House of Gucci” ensemble cast shows how the family members became instruments of their own self-destruction, channeling both style and tragedy in the process.
For more on how this stunning ensemble crafted “House of Gucci,” check out this exclusive clip.