A Phoenix Reborn as The Joker

Here is the scene:

It is pitch black, sitting in a movie theater, the lights go out and the feature film is only minutes away from beginning. The trailers begin playing and the first one is half way memorable. Then the next trailer comes on and I see a man riding a subway through a large metropolitan city, that same man talking to a therapist, standing on a stage performing standup and finally watching him put on his first layer of face paint. Yes, it was that moment that I saw the complete trailer for Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of The Joker that I honestly wished I was at the movies to see that film instead of the one I had paid to see.

The Joker role has been iconic since Cesar Romero played him in the 1966 Batman movie with a list of notable actors (Jack Nicholson, Mark Hamill (voice), Heath Ledger, and Jared Leto) playing the role thereafter. The role, based off of one of Batman’s best known nemesis from the comic books, has forced actors to dig deep, falling into madness as they tried to method act for the role of Joker.

Phoenix’s role of Joker focuses on his life before he met Batman. It shows how he used to moonlight as a stand up comedian before switching careers to become vigilante in Gotham City.

This film is going to be slightly different in its execution of its source material. One of the Joker producers, Emma Koskoff, has shared that, “it’s not my prefered genre, the comic book genre. I literally can not watch those movies. I try but I can’t. I should but I can’t. But I love this movie.”

The film’s director, Todd Phillips, spent a year trying to convince Warner Brothers studio to make the film R-rated in order to diver deeper into the dark history of Joker’s past. He is making a film that is not directly pulled from the source material, so knowledgeable fans who have years of history and facts on the Arthur Fleck (Joker) will watch the story unfold at the same time as the rest of the audience.


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