Lady Gaga Reveals How She Changed Her Singing Voice For Joker 2
“It was unlike anything I’ve ever done before.”
When Lady Gaga takes a movie role, she puts her whole self into it. To promote the inspiring story of A Star Is Born, she famously became a soundbite machine on the press tour. And who could forget the thick Italian accent she put on for House of Gucci? Now, the consummate character chameleon is doing it again as Harley “Lee” Quinn in Joker: Folie à Deux, recently revealing that she completely changed the way she sings for the musical role.
The musical numbers in the upcoming Joker sequel haven’t been unveiled yet, but Gaga braced audiences not to expect her to sound like herself in these performances. “People know me by my stage name, Lady Gaga, right? That’s me as that performer, but that is not what this movie is,” Gaga told Empire in an interview published on July 25. “I’m playing a character. So I worked a lot on the way that I sang to come from Lee, and to not come from me as a performer.”
Interestingly enough, Gaga went into the process of retraining her voice in order to make her a worse singer than she actually is. “For me, there’s plenty of bum notes, actually, from Lee,” she admitted. “I’m a trained singer, right? So even my breathing was different when I sang as Lee. When I breathe to sing on stage, I have this very controlled way to make sure that I’m on pitch and it’s sustained at the right rhythm and amount of time, but Lee would never know how to do any of that. So it’s like removing the technicality of the whole thing, removing my perceived art-form from it all and completely being inside of who she is.”
Another change to Gaga’s usual singing style is the structure of this movie-musical. Rather than belting out a big song, Gaga described the movie’s approach as more subtle and colloquial. “How do you take music and have it just be an extension of the dialogue, as opposed to breaking into song for no conceivable reason?” Gaga said. “It was unlike anything I’ve ever done before.”
