In a recent interview with Empire, pop star Lady Gaga sat down with the website and commented on her role as Harley Quinn for Todd Phillips’ upcoming Joker: Folie À Deux. This film, the sequel to the 2019 Joker, will be a musical, but not in the typical and expected format. Gaga commented on Phillips’ take on the genre, “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? It was unlike anything I’ve ever done before.”

Gaga’s vocals for the film will sound nothing like her pop star persona, but rather something fans have never heard from her before. “People know me by my stage name, Lady Gaga, right?… That’s me as that performer, but that is not what this movie is; 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.”

She also added in her Empire interview, “For me, there’s plenty of bum notes, actually, from Lee. 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.”

Joker: Folie À Deux will hit theatres in the US on October 4 and star Gaga alongside Joaquin Phoenix as he reprises his role as his adaptation of DC’s Joker. Director Phillips comments on Gaga’s portrayal of Quinn, “While there are some things that people would find familiar in her, it’s really Gaga’s own interpretation, and Scott [Silver, co-writer] and I’s interpretation… She became the way how [Charles] Manson had girls that idolized him… The way that sometimes these [imprisoned murderers] have people that look up to them. There are things about Harley in the movie that were taken from the comic books, but we took it and molded it to the way we wanted it to be.”