Stefani Germanotta had to leave behind Lady Gaga in order to get into character as Harley Quinn.
The Academy Award winner explained why she had to deconstruct her entire way of singing in order to better play the iconic character of Harleen ‘Lee’ Quinzel in the upcoming DC musical Joker: Folie à Deux, which premieres October 4 in US theaters.
“People know me by my stage name, Lady Gaga, right?” she told Empire. “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 added, “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 on stage, 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.”
Gaga noted that director Todd Phillips conceived a clever way of integrating the music into the film that breaks from traditional musical structure. “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? It was unlike anything I’ve ever done before,” she said.
Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn & Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck in Joker: Folie à Deux.
Todd Phillips Instagram
Phillips also raved about Gaga’s performance. “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 told Empire.
“She became the way how [Charles] Manson had girls that idolised him,” added Phillips. “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.”
The co-writer and director returns with star Joaquin Phoenix after 2019’s Joker earned them an Academy Award nomination for Best Director and a win for Best Actor, respectively.