Lady Gaga's Harley Quinn Steps Out in a Comic-Inspired Outfit in New Look at Joker: Folie Á Deux
"It was unlike anything I've ever done before."
Lady Gaga is putting on her Joker Face. In the Todd Phillips-directed Joker: Folie Á Deux, the Oscar-winning A Star Is Born actress and 13-time Grammy winner plays Harleen "Lee" Quinzel, an Arkham Asylum patient who goes gaga for Arthur Fleck (Joker Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix). Gaga also served as music consultant on the singsong sequel that sees Joker and Harley's mad love manifest through fanciful but mentally fabricated musical sequences — the result of their shared psychosis referenced in the film's title.
"People know me by my stage name, Lady Gaga, right? That's me as that performer, but that is not what this movie is; I'm playing a character. So I worked a lot on the way that I sang to come from Lee, and to not come from me as a performer," Gaga told Empire Magazine, which debuted a new look at Gaga's Harley in her comic suit-inspired outfit.
While the superstar singer has performed on screen in the Phillips-produced A Star Is Born, the filmmaker's Joker sequel is a different kind of musical. "How do you take music and have it just be an extension of the dialogue, as opposed to breaking into song for no conceivable reason?" she said. "It was unlike anything I've ever done before."
Gaga's Harley is also unlike any version of the character who debuted in Batman: The Animated Series (voiced by Arleen Sorkin) as the Brooklyn-accented accomplice of the Joker, a depiction that carried over to the DCEU Harley Quinn (Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey's Margot Robbie) and her self-titled Max animated series (voiced by Kaley Cuoco).
"While there are some things that people would find familiar in her, it's really Gaga's own interpretation, and Scott [Silver, co-writer] and I's interpretation," Phillips added. "She became the way how [Charles] Manson had girls that idolised him. The way that sometimes these [imprisoned murderers] have people that look up to them. There are things about Harley in the movie that were taken from the comic books, but we took it and molded it to the way we wanted it to be."
DC's Joker: Folie À Deux — starring Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson (The Banshees of Inisherin), Catherine Keener (Get Out), Zazie Beetz (Deadpool 2), and Harry Lawtey (The Pale Blue Eye) — opens only in theaters October 4th.
