After last week's in-theater premiere of "Harlequin Live: One Night Only" at Los Angeles' Grammy Museum, Lady Gaga is releasing the special performance special this Christmas Eve.
Ahead of its release, she sat down with Variety's Chris Willman to talk about the new film, which she calls "a Christmas present."
"I'm feeling like: Why not?" Gaga told Willman, regarding the release date of the special filmed last September. "We have this thing that's sop special to us, so we're just really happy to share it with the fans. It's kind of a rebellious project. And, by Harlequin standards, Christmas is the perfect time to release something rebellious."
Gaga revealed she meant to only perform three songs as a "celebration after the premiere of 'Joker,'" but she and her fiancé, Michael Polansky, decided to do the whole album just a few days before. She tapped Marcell Rév, the director of photography for the "Disease" music video to help with production design:
"And once everything came together with the production design, it really came together because of the album art that we shot in Las Vegas while we were there finishing the record, where it was all shot in this dingy apartment. And when I met the guys that I made the record with, some of them 20 years ago, I was living in a dingy apartment on the Lower East Side. That's where I had all my crazy ideas about anything. So that's how the emotional and raw quality of how we made it made its way into this performance," she said.
She continued to give props to Michael. She said she loves "that he has this closeness with me where he sees my artistry and my musicianship in its infancy, in its raw form."
Despite the mere few-day window between the decision to perform "Harlequin" in full and the taping date, Gaga said she never felt unprepared or unrehearsed. "The point of the whole thing was to capture it in its rawness with all of the fabric of emotional jazz music. So, no, we didn't prepare that much. But in a way, I had been preparing for this for years."
She discussed "Happy Mistake," one of two original songs on the project. She said the song was inspired by a time in her life when "it felt like being happy would be an accident, it felt so impossible." She continued, saying the gift for herself in doing the performance made her "so happy."
Aside from "Harlequin Live," Gaga also discussed the album's nomination for Best Traditional Pop Album, her first time being nominated for the award on her own. Previously, she won the award twice with Tony Bennett, for both "Cheek to Cheek" and "Love for Sale": "I'm not in the category alone, I don't feel, because I guess I'll always feel like Tony is with me in the category," she said.
Variety confirmed that Bennett does have a small cameo in "Harlequin Live," in a way. During her performance of "Smile," a black-and-white TV plays a repairing loop of Bennett, who loved the original version of the song by Charlie Chaplin. Gaga said it wasn't meant to be a memorial, but a moment to bring "a little bit of the real world, with a little bit of a wink" to the performance.
Plus, after first confirming to Zane Lowe her work on new music in various hotel rooms across the world, Gaga further detailed the process. She and Michael set up a piano and a mic in every room, and whenever it feels like a good time to make music, "we just do it." "I take care of myself as much as I can on the road, and I'm finding that that's leading to a lot of songwriting, which is the best," she said.
"Harlequin Live: One Night Only" premieres on Lady Gaga's YouTube channel at 4 p.m. PST on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2025. Read the entire interview with Variety here.