Lady Gaga plays an important character opposite Joaquin Phoenix's sociopath turned anarchist Arthur Fleck in Joker: Folie A Deux, writer-director Todd Phillips' feature that serves as a sequel to his 2019 film Joker. On paper, Gaga plays Lee, Arthur Fleck's lover and a version of Harley Quinn from DC Comics. However, going by the trailers, she seems to be playing a figment of Fleck's twisted imagination.
Discussing what she felt initially about her character in the film, Gaga stated, "My feeling from reading the script initially was that I was excited about how much room there was to play. I felt like while the script was very intentional and it was clear that this was going to be a love story, that the way that we told the love story was going to be unlike anything any of us had made or seen before. And that also meant that Lee should be a character that we had never experienced before. So, one of my favourite things about the script was how real she was.”
Talking about how Lee differs from Harley Quinn, Gaga revealed, "Of course I thought about all of the ways Harley Quinn has been in the world before this script, but it was exciting to me to create Lee in Todd and Joaquin's world, and their world for ‘Joker’ was so different than anyone that we had seen before. And this story of Arthur Fleck, this story of the birth of Joker, is extremely heartfelt and emotional. So I knew that Lee had to also be grounded in that same kind of humanity for this movie to work. So I worked a lot with Todd and Joaquin every single day on how to bring out her humanity amidst a film and a story that's wild.”
Warner Bros Pictures will release Joker: Folie A Deux in non-IMAX theatres on October 2 and on IMAX screens two days later. Written by Scott Silver and Todd Phillips, the Joker sequel's cast also includes Zazie Beetz, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Steve Coogan, Harry lawtey, and Jacob Lofland.