Lady Gaga usually leaves it all on stage — but says she took her latest work home.
The “Joker: Folie à Deux” star shared Tuesday that her role as Lee “Harlequin” Quinzel bled into her private life, as Gaga not only inhabited the titular Batman villain’s disturbed lover on set, but wrote the entire movie soundtrack at home with fiancé Michael Polansky.
Polansky is credited on four of the 13 tracks of the “Harlequin” album, which hit stores Friday.
“I wasn’t finished with this character when I was done making the movie,” Gaga told Entertainment Weekly in an interview published Tuesday. “Creating her had a deeply profound effect on me. The way I prepare for things, Michael also got to know Lee pretty well.”
“We wanted to make something to celebrate the complexity of a woman who has danger within her and also bore a sense of sweetness and couldn’t be defined,” she added. “The way you can’t define Lee in the movie, you also can’t define her in this album, through genre.”
The reported collection of covers of classics songs (including “Good Morning” and “Oh, When the Saints”) and two original tracks presumably complement the characters’ delusions, as both Quinzel and Joker are seen in the trailer bursting into imagined song amidst the chaos they sow.
Gaga said Tuesday that she and Polansky, whose engagement was reportedly spoiled by French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal at the 2024 Olympics in Paris, “conceived of this project together.” Gaga noted her fiancé is “closer to me artistically than most people” she knows.
“I think it’s a beautiful thing when you can, with your partner, share an artistic experience that might be hard for some people, but Michael understands me so well that it actually gave birth to this record,” she told the outlet, praising “his understanding of Lee in our every day life.”
While fans might think they know what to expect from a cheeky roster of cover songs in a self-aware “Joker” sequel, Gaga hinted that her fiancé helped “push the sound” to sonically tell Quinzel’s story — and that it’s a “vibrant, but also tense, dangerous, but also pure” experience.
Her leading co-star Joaquin Phoenix presumably had a different experience making the film, meanwhile, as he lost 52 pounds to embody his emaciated take on Gotham City’s so-called “Clown Prince of Crime” in the 2020 film — and looks similar in footage from the sequel.
“Joker: Folie à Deux” hits theaters Friday.
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