Hear Lady Gaga Singing The Musical Parts Of Joker 2
Lady Gaga sings as Harley Quinn for Joker 2 in the video below.
Any DC fans still wondering if the Joker sequel would really be a musical can stop wondering. A recent video tweeted from the Joker Folie News account proves that for good or ill, Lady Gaga will be belting out show tunes as Harley Quinn in Joker 2. Whether the Clown Prince of Crime himself will spontaneously break into song in Folie à Deux remains to be seen.
The video shows a first-person view of someone hopping a fence to record what appears to be Lady Gaga singing. The pop star isn’t visible in the video, which appears to be taken from a Hollywood backlot of some kind. Gaga’s distinctive pipes, however, can be heard coming from somewhere nearby.
It’s hard to make out what Lady Gaga is singing about on the Joker 2 set, but it definitely has that unmistakable “Hollywood musical” quality about it. While the clip offers no clues as to the plot of the film, it at least confirms that Joker: Folie à Deux–as it’s officially titled–will be a traditional musical.
When Warner Bros. officially announced that Joker 2 was in production last year, fans of the 2019 original rejoiced. Then director Todd Phillips announced the sequel would be a musical, and a lot of fans collectively uttered an emphatic “What the…?” When Lady Gaga was revealed to be part of the Joker 2 cast, the genre change made a little more sense.
Joker focused on Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, a mentally ill clown ignored by society and driven to homicide by his inner demons. Director Todd Phillips styled the movie after early Martin Scorsese work, specifically The King of Comedy. Following the King‘s lead, Joker made it unclear just how much of the movie was real and how much of it was in Arthur’s head.
This is important because it makes a musical sequel seem a little less improbable. Perhaps Lady Gaga singing will be one of Arthur’s hallucinations in Joker 2. Maybe the character herself will be make-believe. As much as fans love Harley Quinn, she doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the gritty Joker universe, not in her most beloved incarnation, at least.
A therapist with Stockholm syndrome dressing like a clown and joining her mass murderer boyfriend for ridiculous capers would seem far-fetched in Joker‘s Gotham. A therapist named Harleen Quinzel, whom Arthur Fleck imagines as a larger-than-life singing clown, however, would absolutely work in the context of the original movie. If Lady Gaga does play a make-believe version of Harley in Joker 2, audiences will have Zazie Beetz to thank for it.
Beetz played Arthur’s neighbor Sophie Dumond in the first Joker. Viewers are led to believe that Sophie and Arthur have a romantic relationship for most of the film before the movie’s most chilling scene shows us otherwise. If most of Sophie’s scenes can be chalked up to Arthur’s fractured psyche, who’s to say the same won’t be true for the musical scenes featuring Lady Gaga in Joker 2?
Fans will get to see for themselves next year. According to IMDb, Joker: Folie à Deux is scheduled for an October 4 release. Until then, Joker fans will have to be content watching the above clip and any others like it that happen to leak between now and then.
