The Madonna Interview

MADONNA! INTERVIEW! 2026! This is Madonna’s eleventh time on the cover of this magazine—more than any other star. HERSTORY! We shot these images late at night on the outskirts of London. Madonna named her shoot’s character Dee Dee, a fun, hard-living broad who drank prosecco, did her hair big, and blasted the Stones ’til we got kicked out. There were moments that night when I felt star power on a level I had never experienced before, if that is possible… The next afternoon, I went to M’s home for round two: a 90-minute gab sesh after hearing the upcoming album, Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II. As a Frida Kahlo portrait glared protectively at me over Madonna’s shoulder, we talked past, present, future, prayer, dicks, nutritional yeast, and more…

THURSDAY 7 PM APRIL 9, 2026 LONDON

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MEL OTTENBERG: You look fantastic.

MADONNA: I’m not Dee Dee anymore. I miss her already. She was a good-time girl.

OTTENBERG: She was so good. And we’re going to talk about her, but first I want to ask what your perfume is because it smells so—

MADONNA: Fruity?

OTTENBERG: Yeah, it smells pretty and delicious. What is it?

MADONNA: It’s a combination of Portrait of a Lady and Radical Rose. I like to move around. My main is Portrait of a Lady, and then I add different things, depending on my mood. I like the name Portrait of a Lady, too. Because she is, sometimes.

OTTENBERG: She is. Okay, so we just listened to the album. You’d already played four songs for me when we first met.

MADONNA: Well, now it’s finished.

OTTENBERG: Let’s start at the beginning. Why this album now?

MADONNA: I was supposed to make a movie about my life. I worked on my script for two years and spent two years at Universal Studios with the line producers doing budgeting and casting. We had a falling out, me and Universal, regarding budget because I needed—I’ve had an extraordinary life. I’ve had a huge life, so I needed a big budget. You know what I mean? It’s not going be a—

OTTENBERG: An indie film.

MADONNA: No. They couldn’t get their heads around it. I found a way to make it for less money in Serbia, but I don’t think they were into the idea of—I don’t know. Maybe they just didn’t believe in me. One of their first reactions was, “We don’t believe you’d stay in Serbia more than four days.” And I said, “Did you read the script?” My whole life has been survival. I’m not going there for a holiday. But anyway, I was in limbo when that fell apart, and then Netflix reached out to make a series. That was a whole other long process, because I couldn’t use the script I had with Universal unless I bought it from them for an extortionist’s price, even though I wrote it. Don’t ask.

OTTENBERG: I won’t.

MADONNA: That’s just the way it goes. I started trying to understand how making a series would work. It’s a very, very different process. You have to meet a lot of writers and find the right showrunner, and I couldn’t find one. This went on for another eight or nine months. I was like, “Good thing I have another job because I need to work, I need to create. I need to do what I was put on this earth to do.”

OTTENBERG: Totally.

MADONNA: I reached out to Stuart [Price] because I thought the world is in a very dark place and people need to dance. I hadn’t worked with Stuart for a long time. We’d just done the Celebration Tour together, but besides that, I didn’t really see or speak to him for probably 15 years. I was living in New York and I reached out to him, thinking, “What if we tried to make Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II, and reenter the world of inspirational dance music?” So I came to London and went to his studio, and we were just playing around to see if there was magic between us. I had a lot of stuff going on in my life personally. My brother was very, very, very ill, and my stepmother, with whom I’d had a very traumatic relationship throughout my entire childhood, had just died.

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