Lady Gaga confirms that she’ll be in Joker: Folie À Deux

You’ve gotta love a casting decision that just makes perfect sense, and Lady Gaga as some unnamed love interest for Joaquin Phoenix in the musical Joker sequel Folie À Deux is perfect. She has exactly the right energy for that universe and for Phoenix’s Joker, and so when her involvement was first rumored back in June, it was only surprising because of how unsurprising it was.

Now, courtesy of Gaga’s own Twitter feed, that rumor has been confirmed: Today, she posted a little teaser clip of Phoenix’s Joker in silhouette dancing with a woman (also in silhouette) along with her name and Joker: Folie À Deux. The teaser also included the release date, October 4, 2024, which we first learned about yesterday.

We don’t specifically know who Lady Gaga is playing, but there really is just the one iconic and canonical love interest for the Joker in every other Joker story, and that’s Harley Quinn. The first movie never committed to Phoenix’s Joker being the Joker—as in the one who fights Batman and poisons the reservoir every other week—but he was definitely a Joker, and Folie À Deux could easily do the same thing with Gaga as a Harley Quinn. Maybe they never even call her Harley Quinn, but that’s the story people know and by not saying otherwise, everybody involved has to know that that’s what people are going to assume.

Plus, the first movie ended with Joker/Arther Fleck getting locked up in Arkham, which is canonically where Joker meets Harley Quinn (when she was one of his psychiatrists, Dr. Harleen Quinzel, which is definitely a real name that someone would have and not a clumsy way to justify the “Harlequin” thing), so it would be pretty to just do that exact story. Throw in some musical numbers, some murders, and a wholly unearned argument about how society treats mental illness, and you’ve got Joker 2.