Lady Gaga looked loved-up and ready to conquer the cinematic world as she arrived at the Venice Film Festival with her fiancée Michael Polansky ahead of the Joker: Folie à Deux’s premiere.
The Bad Romance chart-topper, 38, is about to debut her most highly-anticipated role yet as Harley Quinn (aka Harleen ‘Lee’ Quinzell) in Todd Phillips’ Joker sequel opposite Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix.
The film premiere comes during a thriving year for the Grammy winner who confirmed her engagement to longtime partner and tech entrepreneur Michael, 46, during the Paris Olympics while speaking with French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal.
Now, as she arrived on Monday to the festival by boat she was spotted with her husband-to-be wearing an impressive oval-cut diamond ring on her left ring finger that some experts have estimated to be worth up to £450,000 according to UK retailer, Steven Stone.
Dressed in a black-and-white polka dot dress with a large bow and sunglasses, she then shared a sweet kiss in an intimate moment with Michael – himself dressed in all-black- who is there to support the star for her big moment.
Gaga and Michael have largely kept their romance away from the spotlight and were first linked in December 2019, with the singer confirming their relationship in an Instagram post in February 2020.
Since then, aside from a reported break in 2023, the couple has seemed loved up and committed. In fact, once the Born The Way hitmaker told Hollywood Reporter her dogs and Michael was her ‘whole life’.
In the professional realm before the Joker, Gaga – real name Stefani Germanotta – reached dizzying heights with her film 2018 film A Star Is Born opposite Bradley Cooper which scored her an Oscar win for best original song with Shallow, a best actress nomination as well as a Grammy and Golden Globe.
No doubt, she will be hoping to recreate, and build on, the same success for her latest gig playing the beloved DC supervillain.
The odds of this look likely since the first Joker film was met with critical and commercial success after breaking $1billion (£762million) at the box office.
And she’ll be able to flex her singing skills at the same time since the sequel is a musical, as confirmed by Todd.
‘We never really talked about it like that, but I like to say it’s a film where music is an essential element,’ he said during the CinemaCon following the release of the trailer.
‘To me, that doesn’t veer too far from the first film.’
Joaquin, 49, who plays the titular villain aka Arthur Fleck, teased what to expect in an interview with Variety.
‘It was important to me that we never perform the songs as one typically does in a musical,’ the Hollywood star explained.
‘We didn’t want vibrato and perfect notes,’ he added, saying that they ‘let the emotion guide it’.
Some of the music is fantasy, some of it’s in the scene. It breaks genre,’ Gaga added.
Last year cinematographer Larry Sher spoke about her extreme method for getting into the right mindset to play one-half of the notorious fictional duo that made him worry she ‘hated’ him.
He explained that after weeks of struggling to build a connection with her, he was informed that she was only going by ‘Lee’ on set.
‘The next thing I said was something “Lee,” and it was like everything changed. From that point on, it was like she was… Our whole connection changed. I was like, alright, cool,’ he added.