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Lady Gaga has talked about why she changed her singing voice while playing Harley “Lee” Quinn in the forthcoming Joker sequel Joker: Folie à Deux.
In a new interview, the Oscar and Grammy winner explained that the way she sang as Lee in Folie à Deux was completely different from the way she sings as a trained musician, as her character in the film wouldn’t know any of the techniques that Gaga as a singer would know.
“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,” Gaga told Empire magazine.
“So I worked a lot on the way that I sang to come from Lee and to not come from me as a performer.”
“For me, there’s plenty of bum notes, actually, from Lee. I’m a trained singer, right? So even my breathing was different when I sang as Lee. When I breathe to sing onstage, I have this very controlled way to make sure that I’m on pitch, and it’s sustained at the right rhythm and amount of time, but Lee would never know how to do any of that.
“So it’s like removing the technicality of the whole thing, removing my perceived art form from it all and completely being inside of who she is.”
Lady Gaga is playing Quinn, a follower and sometime lover of the Joker, who emerged as one of DC’s most popular characters after debuting in 1992’s Batman: The Animated Series.
The 2019 film Joker followed the mental decline of wannabe comic and clown Arthur Fleck, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who is rejected both socially and romantically. His violent Joker persona emerges as a result, and he becomes a cult hero.
Phoenix won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance, and the film earned more than $1bn at the box office.
Folie à Deux will see Fleck meet music therapist Lee, who later takes on the Harley Quinn name and persona, while he’s incarcerated at Arkham State Hospital. The two fall in love, and after Fleck’s release, embark on a doomed romantic misadventure.
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Todd Philips, who wrote and directed both Joker and Folie à Deux, said Gaga’s interpretation of the iconic character is different from other versions that came before.
“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,” he said.
“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 moulded it to the way we wanted it to be.”
Margot Robbie has previously played the character on screen, drawing acclaim for her role as Harley in 2016’s otherwise panned Suicide Squad, as well as her own spin-off Birds of Prey and the 2021 reboot The Suicide Squad.
On TV, Kaley Cuoco voices Harley on the well reviewed adult animation Harley Quinn.
In September 2022, after Gaga’s casting announcement, Robbie said she believed Gaga would do an “incredible” job and was happy to pass on the character.
“It makes me so happy because I said from the very beginning, all I want is for Harley Quinn to be one of those characters, the way like Macbeth or Batman always gets passed from great actor to great actor.”
“It’s such an honour to have built a foundation strong enough that Harley can now be one of those characters that other actors get to have a go at playing. I think she’ll do something incredible with it.”
Joker: Folie à Deux will be released in cinemas on 4 October 2024.
