LADY GAGA: BACKLASH TO JOKER 2 WAS UNHINGED
Lady Gaga has described the backlash to Joker: Folie á Deux as “unhinged” and “painful”.
The Oscar-winning singer and songwriter, born Stefani Germanotta, starred as Harley Quinn opposite Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker in the 2024 musical sequel.
The film was a commercial and critical flop despite the star power of the two leads. It earned just £29m in its US opening weekend, which was less than a third of the showing of its predecessor and a figure dwarfed by its more than £150m budget.
Critics and the public panned it, with the New York Times calling it “half-baked” and Time magazine describing the 138-minute feature as “a come-down that essentially punishes [fans] for enjoying the volatile energy of the first film”.
In a cover story with Rolling Stone, the Bad Romance singer has responded to the criticism by calling it, in part, “unhinged”.
She said: “There was a ton of negativity around Joker. And I think I was feeling artistically rebellious at the time.”
Asked if she was bothered by the negative reception, Gaga said: “I wasn’t, like, unfazed. It’s funny, I’m almost nervous to share my reaction. 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 kind of dissipate, that can be a little bit more painful. Only because I put a lot of myself into it.”
Aside from the Joker flop, the pop star has achieved unrivalled success in music and, more recently, in Hollywood. She was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award in 2019 for her role as Ally Campana in A Star is Born, and ended up winning the Oscar for the soundtrack’s lead single, Shallow.
Elsewhere, she has won 14 Grammy Awards and is nominated for a further seven this year for her new album, Mayhem.
She explained that the Joker criticism had in part helped fuel the creation of her new album, specifically the music video for Disease, which is Mayhem’s first single.
The horror movie-esque themes explore the artist battling with different versions of herself and Gaga said it was her response to the world in that she would “show you who I am”.
“I put so much of that energy into that video,” she told Rolling Stone, adding: “I was in that place, you know, I was like, ‘I’ll show you who I am, and I’ll show you what this fight is like.’”
She explained that the choreography was centred around the idea of “me battling myself,” saying: “That song is so deliberately about somebody that wants to harm you – and it being you.”
In January this year, she had also addressed the Joker criticism, saying that as an artist, you had to be open to your audience not liking what you produced sometimes.
Speaking to Elle magazine, she said: “People just sometimes don’t like some things. 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 has said that Mayhem, hailed as a return to her dance-pop roots and released in March to great fanfare, is a “sign of my health as a musician”.
“I was willingly and openly running through all the nightmares of my past and my present and just finding poetry in all of it,” Gaga explained.
She added: “One of the things I’m most grateful for is gaining all my artistic faculties back to make this record. I had to dig very, very deep, and I had to change a lot of my life and re-centre around what I needed as a human being.”
2025-11-14T14:10:47Z