The Reason Behind the Cut: Lady Gaga’s Controversial Same-Sex Kiss in Joker: Folie à Deux.Linh

A viral moment when Lady Gaga was seen kissing a female extra on the set of Joker: Folie a Deux didn’t make the final film. Director Todd Phillips is now explaining why.

During filming for the sequel back in March 2023, Gaga was spotted walking up courthouse stairs when she stops and plants a kiss on a woman in the crowd playing a protester. Footage of the moment went viral on social media as fans speculated how the scene would appear in the final film.

However, that instance and a few other Gaga moments from the trailers didn’t make the final cut.

Phillips, 53, told Entertainment Weekly that Gaga, who plays Lee, a grittier version of Harley Quinn, improvised the same-sex kiss that day on set.

About not including the moment, Phillips explained, “It had dialogue in it, and, all of a sudden, I wanted it to be more of a music and vibe moment. For that moment to have played, it needed dialogue behind it. Meaning, the woman said something, and then Gaga stopped and did this thing, and it just kind of got in the way of the moment.”

Folie a Deux is, in fact, a musical, and also stars Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, now on trial for murder after the events of the 2019 original — which won Phoenix an Oscar for Best Actor and earned $1 billion at the worldwide box office.

Phillips recently told The Hollywood Reporter that Gaga, 38, signed on to the project without reading a completed script: “I think we sent her half the script, and she texted me pretty quickly that she was really into it, that she loved it and everything you want to hear. And then I went out to her house, and we met about what it was going to be, the rest of it, because we hadn’t written it yet.”

In August, Gaga told Variety about the bold risks Phillips and the filmmakers were taking with Folie a Deux.

“Todd took a very big swing with this whole concept and with the script, giving the sequel to Joker this audacity and complexity. There’s music, there’s dance, it’s a drama, it’s also a courtroom drama, it’s a comedy, it’s happy, it’s sad,” she said. “It’s a testament to [Todd] as a director, that he would rather be creative than just tell a traditional story of love.”

In an interview with Vogue, Gaga added that the team was often rewriting scenes on set.

“We’d very often meet in Joaquin’s trailer and sometimes we would just tear the script up and start all over. It was a really cool, liberating process,” said the A Star Is Born actress.

Phillips added, “You think, okay, this scene works, let’s just go shoot it. And Joaquin’s like, ‘No, no, no, let’s just have a quick meeting about it,’ and it’s three hours later and you’re rewriting it on a napkin. What’s great about Lady Gaga is that she really holds her own both off camera when we’re in the trailer tearing things apart — which she probably spent the night before learning — but also on camera. It was not a small feat.”