Lady Gaga has explained how she had to change her singing voice to play Harley “Lee” Quinn in Joker: Folie à Deux.
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In a new interview with Empire magazine, the Oscar and Grammy winner said that she didn’t use many of her professional singing techniques during the film, as her character wouldn’t have known them.
“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,” she 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.”
“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.
She added: “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.”
Folie à Deux sees Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck/Joker meet music therapist Lee while he’s incarcerated at Arkham State Hospital. The two fall in love and, after Fleck’s release, embark on a doomed romantic misadventure.
Todd Philips, who wrote and directed both Joker and the sequel Folie à Deux, said Gaga’s interpretation of Harley Quinn is completely different from other versions that have come 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 told Empire.
“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 previously played the character in 2016’s Suicide Squad, as well as her own spin-off Birds of Prey and the 2021 reboot The Suicide Squad.
Earlier this month, Folie à Deux’s casting director Francine Maisler said that Gaga’s Harley will “blow your mind”, adding that she was “really surprised” that singer was able to keep pace with Phoenix during the shooting of the film.