What are Madonna and Julia Garner up to? The pop icon and Ozark star dropped a joint video on Monday morning (March 23) in which they sit side-by-side in a gondola in Venice, Italy as a gondolier rows them through the city’s iconic canals and they lip synch along to Madonna’s first-ever Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit, “Like a Virgin.”
The brief clip, in which both women are dressed in jeans and a black jacket and hold large straw boater hats, is a nod to the original Mary Lambert-directed “Live a Virgin” video in which Madonna danced and struck seductive poses on a gondola in Venice. The video’s caption reads “Like a Virgin……. again and again,” followed by an Italian flag emoji. Madonna teased her new acting gig last week in an Instagram Story in which she was seen reading a script inside a glass-top boat with the caption “The Italian Job.”
At press time it was unknown what the video was promoting and a spokesperson for Madonna, 67, had not returned Billboard‘s request for additional comment.
What we do know is that both women were reportedly spotted in Venice last week shooting scenes for the upcoming second season of the Emmy-winning Apple TV series The Studio. Both have been added to the already stellar cast featuring co-creator Seth Rogen, as well as Ike Barinholtz, Chase Sui Wonders, Kathryn Hahn and Bryan Cranston.
The series will mark Madonna’s first live-action acting gigs since 2002’s Swept Away and a cameo on Will & Grace a year later, and it will seemingly find her acting alongside Garner, who has been cast to play Madonna in a currently untitled, on-hold biopic.
The film, first announced in 2020 and reportedly slated to feature Garner playing Madonna, has been on-and-off ever since, with Madonna teasing that it was back on in January 2023 after the project was reportedly mothballed in late 2022. Garner ramped up speculation that it was back on in September of last year when W Magazine asked if she was still planning to play the Queen of Pop and she enthusiastically replied, “Yeah!”
At press time no additional information was available about the status of the film.