Lady Gaga has offered her clearest response yet to the fierce backlash that greeted Joker: Folie à Deux, describing the wave of bad reviews and online commentary as so “unhinged” that she initially could not help laughing at it. Speaking in a recent Rolling Stone cover interview, the singer and actor said the volume of negativity around the 2024 sequel caught her off guard, arriving more than a year after the film’s release but still vivid enough that she hesitated to talk about it.
Joker: Folie à Deux, which paired Gaga’s reinterpretation of Harley Quinn with Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, opened in October 2024 to mixed critical notices and sharp audience pushback. The film earned a D grade from CinemaScore and struggled at the box office, taking just over 200 million dollars worldwide compared with the original Joker’s billion-dollar haul. Gaga said she “put a lot” of herself into the project and was not “unfazed” by the reaction, but recalled that when the harshest responses began to pile up she “started laughing” because the discourse felt increasingly out of proportion to the film itself.
Over time, she added, the criticism became more painful as it refused to die down, in part because of how personally she had approached the role. Gaga said she had been feeling “artistically rebellious” during production and later poured lingering emotions into the music video for her single “Disease” and the album Mayhem, which returned her to the top of the pop charts and is now a major awards contender.
The film itself remains a divisive entry in comic-book cinema. Early reviews were split between those who praised its musical risk-taking and psychological ambition and those who found the two-hour-plus running time laboured, its tonal shifts jarring and its depiction of mental illness and toxic romance troubling. Some critics argued that Gaga was underused in a story still framed largely around Arthur Fleck, even as others singled out her performance as a high point in a film they regarded as structurally uneven.
Gaga’s comments arrive as she speaks more openly about the toll major projects can take. In the same Rolling Stone profile, cited in later reporting, she revealed that she was on lithium while making A Star Is Born and required psychiatric care during its promotional period, saying she feels “lucky to be alive.” Against that backdrop, her response to the Joker sequel’s reception is framed less as defiance than as an effort to reclaim artistic agency: acknowledging that the backlash hurt, insisting that creative risk is still worth taking and suggesting that what stung most was not that people disliked the film, but how frenzied the reaction became.
