Lady Gaga Reveals All About Harley Quinn, Being In Love and Her New Album | Vogue

Yes. I just feel so excited. I feel so grateful. I just came from the London premiere of Joker Folie a deux and I got to see at least 800 to a couple thousand fans or something. It was just like this really special exciting experience delivering the movie to the world. Now I'm here talking to you and after we talk I'm going to go to the first listening party of Harlequin which is a companion album that I made to go with the film Joker and their little monsters will hear the album for the very first time. Sharing the film with a new audience is exciting and a little nerve-wracking but it's so much of a shared vision with the director and your fellow actors and Harlequin is all my own. My interpretation of all the music from the film as well as a couple originals a little bit of a different feeling. It's much more scary I think. I get really kind of nervous and I feel super fragile which is probably unreasonable and silly but yeah that's how I feel. This is Custom Celine by Eddie Slimane. We have known each other for a long time and he photographed me for the cover of my album The Fame Monster. I actually realized tonight my hair is actually very similar to the album cover that he shot. Different outfits also strong shoulders. Tonight was like a really special evening meant to be kind of elegant and a little bit rebellious. Two things I like. Arianne Phillips and I worked on styling this film together. We had this tall order because there's an idea that people have about Harlequin and we wanted to create something completely new. That was a challenge but we really focused on what would be true to her. The clothes were kind of immature indicative of a like a younger mind. In that way I think we were honing in on this kind of uncomfortable young quality in her even though she's in her 30s. We also talked a lot about feminism and prairie dresses and what that kind of domestic garb meant at an earlier point in time and how it was subverted to become feminist in the right sort of context of styling. And I think that some of the reason that we did that too was because Lee is obsessed with a man. That subversion created a authenticity and vulnerability and uniqueness to her that was maybe also a little provocative. Developing Lee was really private and you know something that I will always remember and when I watched the film back I noticed right away some things that I shared through her that are something that only people really close to me would know. I think that there's some like stigma as actors like not leaving their roles but for me it has more to do with all of the things that you learn when you are being creative or developing a project or a character. That's why I made Harlequin because I wanted to keep going. My fiance Michael and I co-executive produced this album. We went through this really special experience making Joker together. We were able to have this really deep conversation about Lee and Arthur and Harley and Joker and in what ways does Harley fantasize about harnessing all of Joker's fame and in what ways would she fantasize about some kind of revenge on him for all the ways that he may break her heart. I just wasn't really done with Lee when I was done filming the movie. We decided it could be just like a really imaginative experience with music to take all the complexities of her as a character and translate them into an album. Harlequin is a woman that decides who she is when she wants to and is completely unapologetic, unpredictable, rebellious, loud and soft, pure and tainted. She's the embodiment of you know everything I believe women deserve to have in terms of freedom. It's like this incredibly unique experience to be in love with somebody that you can also create with. There's a song that's really special to me called Happy Mistake and that song is a very very personal look at the human being that played Lee and my relationship with playing broken women throughout my career in different ways. One of the lyrics is a lonely disposition, portraits of a strung out girl. How'd I get so addicted to the love of the whole world? It's kind of a confession of what it's like to live dual identities. The ultimate confessional Lady Gaga song in a way. I'm going to go to the first listening party of Harlequin. This was like our brainchild together so it's so fun for us to deliver it to the fans. I have such amazing fans and seeing them out in London tonight was so so fun. They already had printouts of the Harlequin album cover and they were wearing the makeup but that was so cool to see. It's hard to describe almost two decades long of a relationship with this community. When I first came out a lot of interviewers all over the world wanted to ask me about my clothes. I would often get made fun of like in the interview or there'd be a lot of like probing questions. Why the stage persona? Why the name? Why all of it? My fans always felt that I wasn't really that weird. I feel like my fans always have kind of had a secret handshake with me of like you know we've got you like we know who you are. You know you don't have to apologize for who you are. I still feel that way. That's really cool to run into fans at a movie premiere when you're 38 and you're still like doing hand signals and going like it's cool just be yourself. That's all folks.