If fans don’t go gaga for this latest iteration of Harley Quinn, it clearly won’t be the script’s fault. Despite Joker: Folie à Deux’s endless and sometimes tiring rewrites, Lady Gaga relished the creative process of fashioning the perfect screenplay as both a “cool” and “liberating” one. In Arthur Fleck’s (Joaquin Phoenix) latest big-screen adventure, Gaga is tasked with the awesome responsibility of portraying one of the most beloved DC characters in director Todd Phillips’ long-awaited sequel.
And even though the Grammy award-winning singer has appeared recently in a couple of high-profile films, as a leading lady (A Star Is Born, House of Gucci), she still regards Folie à Deux as the pinnacle of her movie career. Gaga said in an interview with Vogue:
[Joker 2 is] the biggest movie I’ve ever been a part of […] We’d very often meet in Joaquin’s trailer, and sometimes we would just tear the script up and start all over. It was a really cool, liberating process.
Phillips responded by saying of Gaga’s on-set work ethic and collaborative nature (below):
“My line about Joaquin [Phoenix] is that he’s the tunnel at the end of the light.
You think, Okay, this scene works, let’s just go shoot it. And Joaquin’s like, ‘No, no, no, let’s just have a quick meeting about it.’ And it’s three hours later, and you’re rewriting it on a napkin.
What’s great about Lady Gaga is that she really holds her own both off camera when we’re in the trailer tearing things apart
— which she probably spent the night before learning —
but also on camera. It was not a small feat.”
Lady Gaga’s Inner ‘Mania & Chaos’ Helped Create Her Harley
Lady Gaga is stepping into a much larger world, and one in which the fandom can be fiercely loyal or unforgivingly cruel. But portraying Harley Quinn in the musically surreal setting of the Joker: Folie à Deux seems like it would be an easy fit for the musician/actress, even though co-star Joaquin Phoenix “encouraged her to sing poorly.” More on that later, but first Gaga addresses taking on a pop culture phenomenon and adding her own “mania” and “chaos” to the DC character during the same interview:
“Harley Quinn is a character people know from the ether of pop culture.
I had a different experience creating her, namely my experience with mania and chaos inside — for me, it creates a quietness.
Sometimes, women are labeled as these overly emotional creatures and when we are overwhelmed we are erratic or unhinged.
But I wonder if when things become so broken from reality, when we get pushed too far in life, what if it makes you… quiet?”
Gaga is a multi-time nominee and Grammy Award winner, but Phoenix knew that the artist’s greatest strength — that soulful and incomparable voice — might serve her better if it was downplayed in the super-villain sequel. Phoenix shared the advice he gave his on-screen love interest, Gaga, during the same sit-down:
“I encouraged her to sing poorly.
I remember asking her to sing without her vibrato.
She has a beautiful vibrato — too beautiful.
I think she felt naked without it.
But as soon as she moved away from technique, she unlocked her character’s voice.”
Phoenix and Gaga’s big-screen team-up is tracking toward a massive opening weekend. At the time of this writing, Joker: Folie à Deux’s long-range forecast is predicting Phillips’ film will make somewhere in the neighborhood of $115 million to $140 million domestically over its three-day debut this fall. By comparison, the original Joker ($96.4 million) didn’t even crack the $100-million mark during its premiere back in 2019.
Joker: Folie à Deux
opens in theaters on
October 4.
And check out the film’s official trailer below: