Lady Gaga on ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’, Getting Engaged, and the Joy of Making Pop Music Again

The film mucks around in fame and fans and mental illness and monsters—Lady Gaga themes, all. When I ask her how the film, or the character, relates to her own life, she surprises me with this eloquent bit of introspection: “Harley Quinn is a character people know from the ether of pop culture. I had a different experience creating her, namely my experience with mania and chaos inside—for me, it creates a quietness. Sometimes women are labeled as these overly emotional creatures and when we are overwhelmed we are erratic or unhinged. But I wonder if when things become so broken from reality, when we get pushed too far in life, what if it makes you…quiet?”

Her voice cracks again and she takes a moment. “I would say that I worked from a sense-memory perspective: What does it feel like to walk through the world and be…braced, in an intense way. And what happens when you cover up all of the complexities beneath the surface?”

She does eventually play music for me. One song, which was about to be released in a few weeks, is the sublime duet with Bruno Mars “Die With a Smile.” Gaga was in Malibu putting the final touches on her own record when Bruno called out of the blue. “He asked me to come to his studio to hear something,” says Gaga. “It was around midnight when I got there and I was blown away. We stayed up all night finishing the song.” She turns it all the way up. “Bruno and I think the world needs to hear this song,” she says. “It’s some real shit. It’s a real conversation. And it’s about love.”

She queues up a song from her new pop record. It’s intense and ominous—an old-school Gaga banger, unsettling but also buoyant. She does not want to say too much about the new record other than to tell me that it was her fiancé’s idea. “Michael is the person who told me to make a new pop record. He was like, ‘Babe. I love you. You need to make pop music.’ ” Says Polansky: “Like anyone would do for the person they love, I encouraged her to lean in to the joy of it. On the Chromatica tour, I saw a fire in her; I wanted to help her keep that alive all the time and just start making music that made her happy.”

Chromatica, Gaga’s last pop album, came out in May 2020, right after the world locked down and “Stupid Love” and “Rain on Me” became the soundtrack to that terrible moment. “When I went on the Chromatica Ball tour in 2022,” she says, “that was the first time I’ve performed not in pain in…I don’t even remember.”

Lady Gaga fractured her hip during her Born This Way Ball tour a decade before, which set in motion years of pain from fibromyalgia, a chronic disorder that manifests as widespread muscle pain, her agony documented in the 2017 Netflix film Gaga: Five Foot Two.

The Chromatica tour was an epiphany. “Michael and I did that tour together,” she says. “I did it pain-free! I haven’t smoked pot in years. I’ve, like, changed.” She laughs. “A lot. I feel like this new album, in a lot of ways, is about that time but from a place of happiness instead of misery. And now, Michael and I are really excited to organize our lives—and our marriage—around our creative output as a couple.” She shoots me a look. “Which is really different than, like, doing what other people want you to do.”