Lady Gaga is offering her thoughts on the negative reception of Joker: Folie à Deux. In the sequel to the 2019 Oscar-winning film, the A Star Is Born actress, 38, portrays Lee, the Harley Quinn to Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker.
Following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, Joker: Folie à Deux—a gritty musical courtroom drama—received a mixed response from both critics and fans when it was released in theaters in October.
Currently, the film holds a 31 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, and the 2025 Razzie Awards singled it out as one of the “worst” movies of the year, even nominating Gaga in the “worst actress” category.
In an interview on Jan. 28, Gaga addressed the criticism, saying, “People just sometimes don’t like some things. It’s that simple.”
“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 continued.
Todd Phillips, Lady Gaga, and Joaquin Phoenix attended the Joker: Folie à Deux red carpet event during the 81st Venice International Film Festival at Sala Grande on September 4, 2024, in Venice, Italy.
The singer—who is gearing up for the release of her upcoming album Mayhem on March 7 and is set to appear in the next season of Tim Burton’s Wednesday—noted that a fear of failure can be difficult to manage.
“When fear makes its way into your life, that can be hard to get control of. It’s part of the mayhem,” she said.
Directed by Todd Phillips, Joker: Folie à Deux is now streaming on Max. In an August interview, Gaga praised Phillips for his bold approach, stating, “Todd took a very big swing with this whole concept and with the script, giving the sequel to Joker this audacity and complexity.”
She added at the time, “It’s a testament to [Todd] as a director, that he would rather be creative than just tell a traditional story of love.”
The first Joker film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and grossed over $1 billion at the global box office. However, the sequel received zero Oscar nominations and fell short commercially, earning $207 million worldwide.
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav reportedly commented during an investors’ call in November, “Inconsistency also remains an issue at our motion picture studio, as reinforced recently by the disappointing results of Joker 2.”
