Gaga laughs off ‘Joker’ backlash

Lady Gaga said she found the negative reactions to last year’s ‘Joker: Folie a Deux’ amusing “because it was just getting so unhinged.”“There was a ton of negativity around ‘Joker’,” the 39-year-old singer-actress said, adding, “I think I was feeling artistically rebellious at the time.”Gaga plays Lee, who eventually becomes Harley Quinn, a patient in Arkham State Hospital, opposite Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, a maximum-security inmate.

The sequel to the 2019 film ‘Joker’ did not perform well at the box office and received negative reviews from critics and audiences.

“I wasn’t, like, unfazed. It’s funny, I’m almost nervous to share my reaction,” Gaga said when asked whether the negative reviews affected her. “But the truth is, when it first started happening, I started laughing. Because it was just getting so unhinged.”

She added, “When it takes a while for something to dissipate, kind of, that can be a little bit more painful, only because I put a lot of myself into it.”

The original ‘Joker’, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019 and won the Golden Lion, was both a critical and commercial success. It received 11 Oscar nominations, with Phoenix winning Best Actor and Hildur Gudnadottir taking Best Original Score and became the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever.

Gaga previously addressed the film’s poor reception in a January interview. “People just sometimes don’t like some things,” she 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 also said she channelled many of her feelings about the movie into a music video for her song ‘Disease’, released weeks after the Joker sequel hit theatres.

“When we were done filming [the music video], I went kind of into a dark place mentally,” Gaga said. “Maybe I scared myself a little bit. For weeks, I was really bothered. It was in my head a lot. I was actually trying to figure out what I was trying to say. There’s a side of me that’s scared of another side. And I think there was a sense in me that I was not done healing.”

‘Joker: Folie a Deux’ is now streaming on HBO Max.