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 complete.