Lady Gaga put her heart and soul into playing Harley “Lee” Quinn for “Joker: Folie à Deux” — and that included channeling her own “experience with mania and chaos” as an artist.
The Grammy and Oscar winner told Vogue that instead of making Harley Quinn an “unhinged” persona, she wanted to ground the comic book character in the real mental health space.
“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,” Gaga said. “Sometimes women are labeled 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?”
Quinn is canonically a psychiatrist who treats Arthur Fleck AKA the Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) in Arkham Asylum. The character originated in the “Batman the Animated Series” show and has since spurred both animated standalone series and Margot Robbie’s take on the character in “Suicide Squad,” “The Suicide Squad,” and “Birds of Prey.” Gaga is only the second actress to take on the role in a live-action film.
“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?” Gaga explained of how she approached bringing Harley Quinn to life.
“Joker: Folie à Deux” director Todd Phillips was of course familiar with Gaga before she was cast in the role; Phillips was a producer on Gaga’s breakout acting turn in “A Star Is Born.”
“She’s sort of touched, in a way,” Phillips said of Gaga. “She can be really hard on herself as a performer. She takes it seriously. But she’s magic, which sounds so simple, but that is actually the only way to describe her abilities.”
Gaga previously told Empire magazine that she had to shed her own stage presence to play Harley Quinn.
“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 said. “So I worked a lot on the way that I sang to come from Lee, and to not come from me as a performer.”
She added of the musical feature, “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.”
Read the IndieWire review for “Joker: Folie à Deux” here.
