October’s Joker: Folie à Deux isn’t just bringing back Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck back, it’s also introducing his main squeeze Harley Quinn. Played here by Lady Gaga and going by the name “Lee,” she puts some pep in Arthur’s step, and it looks like the two are going to tear it up around Gotham City together. According to Gaga, putting a spin on Harley meant undergoing a bit of a transformation.
As part of Empire Magazine’s cover story on the sequel, the singer-actor explained her choice to downplay her typical bombastic and showy presence, particularly for the film’s musical sequences. “Lady Gaga … is not what this movie is; I’m playing a character,” she said. “I worked a lot on the way that I sang to come from Lee, and to not come from me as a performer.” Whereas Gaga knows how to control her breath and rhythm while singing, Lee wouldn’t, so she had to “remove the technicality” of being a pop star.
It also meant singing wrong, sometimes: “There’s plenty of bum notes from her,” Gaga laughed. Using music as extension of dialogue was “unlike anything I’ve ever done before.”
The original Joker featured a reworked origin story for its title character, and the same holds true with Folie à Deux and Lee. While she’ll still fall for Joker, here she’s a music psychiatrist for the inmates of Arkham Asylum rather than a psych intern manipulated into loving him.
Director Todd Phillips said elements of Harley have been retained for Lee, but otherwise, “it’s really [Gaga’s] own interpretation, and mine and [writer] Scott Silver’s.” He likened her to women who idolized Charles Manson and other killers behind bars, and noted, “We took things about Harley in the comics and molded them into the way we wanted them to be for the movie.”
Joker: Folie à Deux releases in theaters on October 4.
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