Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix had fans in and around London’s Leicester Square in ecstasy for the Wednesday U.K. premiere of Joker: Folie à Deux from director Todd Phillips and Warner Bros.
The follow-up to the critical and commercial smash hit film Joker premiered at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month. The movie stars Phoenix as Arthur Fleck/Joker, the same role that earned Phoenix a best actor Oscar for his performance in the 2019 film. Lady Gaga plays Harley Quinn, the Joker’s companion in crime.
In Joker: Folie à Deux, Arthur Fleck is institutionalized at Gotham’s Arkham Asylum, awaiting trial for his crimes as the Joker. There, he finds love with Harley Quinn, played by Lady Gaga, and also the “music that’s always been inside him.”
The stars, director, and producers Emma Tillinger Koskoff and Joseph Garner walked the London red carpet outside the Cineworld Leicester Square cinema, with especially Gaga, who has just announced Joker: Folie à Deux companion album Harlequin, drawing repeated eruptions of cheers and screams of “Gaga!” from an electrified fan base.
Phillips told a group of journalists on the red carpet about the key role music plays in the Joker sequel. “What inspired the music is the idea that in the first movie — it was something that Joaquin and I talked about really early on — Arthur, even though he was left-footed with the world, has music in him,” he said. “You saw it in the first movie when he danced down the stairs or danced in the bathroom. So we thought: Well, if he finally finds love in his life, maybe that music that was inside of him comes out of him. So it’s not as out there as it seems to a lot of people. To us, it was very logical.”
Harry Lawtey, star of HBO’s Industry, plays Harvey Dent, also known as Two-Face, in the new movie. Could audiences see more of him in this role? “To be honest, that would certainly be above my pay grade,” he told THR. “All I can say is it was an enormous privilege to play him. There is such an incredible heritage and legacy to that character in terms of the comic books and the fandom. There are a lot of people that really care about him, and that certainly wasn’t lost on me. So to try and take ownership of that, only briefly, of course, was a real pleasure.”
Lawtey also shared with THR: “I think that’s one of the beauties of these kind of roles: Other people get a chance to interpret them and reappropriate them through different projects and really make them their own. And so I was encouraged to do that, and hopefully, I’ve made a slightly different Harvey Dent.”
