Lady Gaga changed her singing voice for ‘Joker: Folie A Deux’ because she wanted her character’s performance to be distinctive from her own records and concerts.
The 38-year-old singer-actress portrays Lee, a version of Harley Quinn, in the DC Comics movie, starring opposite Joaquin Phoenix, who reprises his role as mentally ill Arthur Fleck aka The Joker.
Gaga’s Quinn, sees the character working as a music therapist in Arkham Asylum who meets Arthur and becomes fascinated with him and ultimately obsessed with the incarcerated criminal.
The pop star purposefully altered her performance in the film to ensure audiences could clearly understand she was “playing a character”.
In an interview with Empire magazine, she said: “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. So I worked a lot on the way that I sang to come from Lee and to not come from me as a performer.”
The ‘Poker Face’ hitmaker added she included “plenty of bum notes” in order to guarantee audiences wouldn’t just see Lady Gaga when they watched Lee in the movie.
She explained: “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.
“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.”
It isn’t just her singing voice that is different, as director Todd Phillips revealed Gaga made the role her own by altering aspects of the villain’s comic book characterisations, and compared her version of Harley Quinn to a Manson Family member.
Cult leader Charles Manson – who died in November 2017 aged 83 – radicalised his Manson Family members, many of whom were middle class American girls involved in the hippie movement, and instructed them to commit a series of murders and crimes in the late 1960s and ’70s, including taking the life of actress Sharon Tate.
Phillips, 53, said: “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.
“She became the way how 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.”
