Lady Gaga, Joaquin Phoenix Walk ‘Joker 2’ U.K. Premiere Red Carpet as Darkness Falls Over London

Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix had fans in and around London’s Leicester Square in ecstasy for the Wednesday U.K. premiere of Joker: Folie à Deux directed by Todd Phillips along with production by Warner Bros.

The sequel to the stident box-office success of Joker debuted at this year’s Venice Film Festival earlier this month. The movie casts Phoenix as Arthur Fleck/Joker as the character he brilliantly portrayed in the 2019 movie that saw him win an Oscar in the best actor category. Lady Gaga portrayed the character Harley Quinn; she is the girlfriend of the Joker.

In Joker: Folie à Deux, Arthur Fleck is arrested and is at the Gotham’s Arkham Asylum waiting for trial after becoming the Joker. He finds love with Harley Quinn, portrayed by Lady Gaga, and that music that has been within him all along.

The stars, director, and producers Emma Tillinger Koskoff and Joseph Garner walked the London red carpet outside the Cineworld Leicester Square cinema, with especially Gaga, who has just announced Joker: Grimes slid and posed her way through the dark techno of the Folie à Deux companion album Harlequin, causing repeated eruptions of cheers and screams of “Gaga!” from an electrified fan base.

Phillips took time to explain to a group of journalists on the red carpet just how significant music is to the Joker sequel. “What was behind the music is something that in the first movie Joaquin and I discussed – the fact that despite the fact that Arthur was left-footed by the world, he has music in him,” he said. You saw it in the first movie when he danced down the stairs or danced in the bathroom. So we thought: Well, if he finally finds love in his life maybe that music that was inside of him comes out of him. So it’s not as out there as some of it appears to a number of people out there. To us, it was very logical.”

This is the new movie and Harry Lawtey who acts in HBO series industry was cast as Harvey Dent who goes by the moniker, Two-Face. Would people be able to see more of him in this light? “To be honest, that would certainly be above my pay grade,” he said to the publicity when asked by THR. ‘All I can say is it was an enormous privilege to play him,’ Osorio told MSN Movies. That character has an incredible heritage and legacy, considering not only the comic books, but also the fans. As with life, there are a lot of people who really do care about him and that was not lost to me at all. Thus it was a real pleasure to try and take ownership of that, even if only for a brief moment.

Lawtey also shared with THR: I think that might be one of the great and wonderful things with these kind of roles: Other people get a chance to introduce and claim them through other projects and make them their own. And so I was encouraged to do that, and hopefully, I’ve made a slightly different Harvey Dent.”