Lady Gaga Had to Purposely Tank Her Singing Voice for ‘Joker: Folie À Deux: ‘There’s Plenty of Bum Notes’

Lady Gaga shouldn’t have to explain this to you, but when she’s on the big screen she’s not Lady Gaga, or even Stefani Germanotta. So, when you go see her in the upcoming Joker: Folie à Deux and notice that the singing voice of her character Harley Quinn is a bit off, it’s called acting, folks.

“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.” Gaga, who has disappeared into roles before in A Star Is Born and House of Gucci, said the task of becoming the Joker’s fiendish foil was “unlike anything I’ve ever done before.”

In particular, that required Gaga to explore sides of her performance style that she’s never tapped before, including the bad singer one. “For me, there’s plenty of bum notes, actually, from Lee,” she said of her character’s singing in the second movie starring Joaquin Phoenix as the laughing madman. “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.”

The follow-up to 2019’s Oscar-winning Joker follows feckless comedian Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) meeting his lady love Harley Quinn (Gaga) while locked up at Arkham State Hospital. After he’s released, the two go on a series of murderous adventures.

Director Todd Philips told Empire that while Gaga retains some of the belovedly bonkers Quinn quirks from the Batman: The Animated Series comic books and her own animated show, the singer definitely made the character her own. “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,” said Phillips. “She became the way how [Charles] Manson had girls that idolized 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.” Prepare for a performance that’s totally Gaga.”

Joker: Folie à Deux is slated to open in theaters on Oct. 4; watch the new trailer here.

In the meantime, Gaga is set to perform at Friday’s (July 26) opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, alongside other rumored artists who are expected to help kick off the games, including Celine Dion, Dua Lipa, Ariana Grande, French singer Aya Nakamura and rockers Gojira, though at press time none of those acts had been confirmed.