Yahoo Lifestyle Lady Gaga Speaks Out on ‘Joker 2’ Bad Reviews: ‘You Keep Going Even if Something Didn’t Connect in the Way You Intended’
Lady Gaga is finally weighing in on the negative reviews that her latest film “Joker: Folie à Deux” received after it opened last fall.
“Joker” (2019) was a critical and box office success that made more than $1 billion and won two Academy Awards. The sequel, however, was a drastic departure from the original. It added Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn, the love interest to Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, as well as several musical numbers, after the first movie was praised as a dark thriller and an original take on the Batman villain’s origin story. “Folie à Deux” only grossed a little more than $200 million at the box office and, suffice to say, did not receive any Oscar nominations (in fact, it’s up for seven Razzies).
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Speaking to Elle magazine in a new interview published Tuesday, Gaga broke her silence on “Joker: Folie à Deux’s” negative reviews.
“People just sometimes don’t like some things,” Gaga said. “It’s that simple. And I think to be an artist, you have to be willing for people to sometimes not like it. And you keep going even if something didn’t connect in the way that you intended.”
She added that the fear of failing is what can be most harmful to a person.
“When that makes its way into your life, that can be hard to get control of. It’s part of the mayhem,” she said.
Gaga’s thoughts on “Joker 2” are a bit more positive than one of the movie’s own cast members, comedian Tim Dillon, who said “it’s the worst film ever made.”
“It has no plot,” Dillon added. “We would sit there, me and these other guys were all dressed in these security outfits because we’re working at the Arkham Asylum, and I would turn to one of them and we’d hear this crap and I’d go, ‘What the fuck is this?’ And they’d go, ‘This is going to bomb, man.’ I go, ‘This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.’ We were talking about it at lunch, and we’d go, ‘What is the plot? Is there a plot? I don’t know, I think he falls in love with her in the prison?’ It’s not even hate-watchable. That’s how terrible it is.”
On the other hand, director Quentin Tarantino has raved about “Joker 2” and said Phoenix gives “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in my life.”
After releasing a “Joker 2” companion album, titled “Harlequin,” last fall, Gaga announced on Monday that her next album, “Mayhem,” will release on March 7.
“The album started as me facing my fear of returning to the pop music my earliest fans loved,” Gaga said in the album announcement, describing the creative process as “reassembling a shattered mirror: even if you can’t put the pieces back together perfectly, you can create something beautiful and whole in its own new way.”
Elsewhere in her Elle interview, Gaga talks about endorsing Kamala Harris for president and performing at Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration.
“The main thing is I have so much compassion and love for so many people that are afraid today,” she said. “I want to acknowledge I’m a very blessed person and I feel really grateful for so much in my life every day. I know for a lot of people this election was devastating for their existence and so community is going to be the number one thing. This just reminds me that we need each other and supporting each other is important. I am one of many people that supports [the LGBTQIA+ and other marginalised] communities. And we’re not going down without a fight. We will stick together. It’s going to be hard but I’m up for it. We’re up for it. And I just want everyone to know how deeply they’re loved and not invisible.”
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