Lady Gaga has revealed she drew from her own experiences with “mania” and the “chaos inside” to create her Harley Quinn character in Joker: Folie à Deux.
The film is the follow up to 2019’s Joker, and is out in cinemas on October 4. It received its premiere at the 81st Venice International Film Festival this week (September 4), with some of the early reactions hailing it as the “movie of the year”.
The most recent clip of the film to have been officially shared shows Gaga – who plays Harleen ‘Lee’ Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn – singing ‘Get Happy’ from the 1950 Judy Garland film Summer Stock alongside Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, aka the Joker.
In a new interview with Vogue, the actor and singer has opened up about the personal resonance that the character has with her own life, saying: “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 labelled 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?”
She continued by explaining that she drew from this personal reflection when building the character. “I would say that I worked from a sense-memory perspective: What does it feel like to walk through the world and be…braced, in an intense way. And what happens when you cover up all of the complexities beneath the surface?”
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Gaga has previously said she “lost a lot of weight” to play the character, who is also said to have been partially inspired by the followers of Charles Manson.
Director Todd Phillips made the unconventional decision to make the sequel a musical, which Gaga has hailed as “a very big swing”, praising the film’s “audacity and complexity”.
In a four-star review of Folie à Deux, NME wrote: “As with the original movie, the film looks gorgeous throughout, with cinematographer Lawrence Sher making strong use of colour and conjuring up some beautiful images – highlights include an overhead shot of some umbrellas (referencing Jacques Demy’s 1964 musical The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg) and a stunningly lit frame of Arthur lighting a cigarette in his prison cell that resembles a lovingly illustrated comic book panel.
“In short, Phillips and Silver have delivered the last thing anyone expected: a socially responsible Joker movie that finds an intriguing way to explore the consequences (both on and offscreen) of the first film. Joker fans shouldn’t cry too hard though – Warner Bros. have cleverly found a way to leave the door open a little for the franchise to continue, should the need arise.”
Last month, Phillips suggested that Folie à Deux will be the final film in his Joker franchise: “It was fun to play in this sort of sandbox for two movies, but I think we’ve said what we wanted to say in this world.”