Director Todd Phillips Spills All on Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga on ‘Joker 2’
Starring Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix, Joker: Folie à Deux is the much-anticipated sequel to Joker, set to premiere this October. Director Todd Phillips recently sat down with Variety to discuss the film and its two stars.
It all began with a dream. While filming Joker in 2018, Joaquin Phoenix had a vivid vision of the Joker telling jokes and singing onstage while wearing full clown makeup. Phoenix remembers: “Todd was in the wings talking to me through a headset. I woke up feeling elated and called him, hoping he’d want to do a [Broadway] show with me.”
The film earned over $1 billion after its release in 2019. Five years later, the sequel is set to premiere at the Venice Film Festival. And yes, Arthur Fleck (Joker) sings and dances with Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Harley Quinn), played by Lady Gaga, as they bond and fall in love.
Phillips says the escalation was natural: “The question became, ‘how can we top ourselves?’ And you can only do that if you do something dangerous.”
This meant exploring the Joker’s mind becoming increasingly untethered—in a medium largely correlated to froth and fun. The 53-year-old director definitely felt the pressure: “[There] were days on set where you’d look around and think, ‘Holy f****** shit! What did we do?’”
Gaga was all for it. The 38-year-old Bad Romance singer was glad they took such a big swing. She said, “[The script gives the sequel] this audacity and complexity. There’s music, there’s dance, it’s a drama, it’s also a courtroom drama, it’s a comedy, it’s happy, it’s sad.”
Two years after the end of the first film, Joker and Harley Quinn fall into a fantasy world that mirrors classic musicals from the 1940s and 50s. Again, Gaga dove right into the story: “It’s a testament to [Phillips] as a director, that he would rather be creative than just tell a traditional story of love.”
However, Phillips hesitated to categorize the film as a true musical. “Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue. It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead.”
Phoenix backs this up. The 49-year-old Walk the Line star is a talented singer in his own right, but he said: “It was important to me that we never perform the songs as one typically does in a musical. We didn’t want vibrato and perfect notes.”
Phoenix and Gaga performed the songs live, and both went to extremes to inhabit their characters. Phillips praised their dedication and said, “Does he take it seriously? Does she take it seriously? Hell, yeah. But he doesn’t stay in character 24 hours a day. With her, I’d say she does a lot more of that than he does. But as a director, I’m in favor of whatever it takes to get them to the place they need to be.”
