Joker 2 Is Happening Because Joaquin Phoenix Had A Dream

While neither Phillips has admitted that he wouldn’t necessarily call it method acting, it’s an open secret that Joaquin Phoenix takes his acting roles very seriously. That’s one of the reasons he lost so much weight to convincingly portray the thin Arthur Fleck in the first Joker movie.

And the role stuck with the actor enough that it invaded his subconscious: he later described how the movie that would become Joker 2 came to him in a dream where he was Fleck again, in full clown makeup and alternating between singing and telling jokes onstage.

Interestingly, Phoenix’s vision of Joker 2 had another important figure in the dream: the director of the first film, Todd Phillips. According to the actor, “Todd was in the wings talking to me through a headset.”

The subconscious vision put Phoenix in a good mood, and he soon called the director in hopes of manifesting his recent dream. “I woke up feeling elated and called him, hoping he’d want to do a show with me.”

Phillips was down to make a Joker 2 with Phoenix, though their earlier ideas seemed like potential nightmares compared to the actor’s pleasant dream. At first, they considered making the dream real in a very literal way by staging a Broadway show, but the duo realized how impractical doing that would be.

As Phillips put it, “it takes four years to put something like that together,” and such a production wouldn’t work with a major star like Phoenix: “is Joaquin really going to give six months of his life to do that every night onstage?”

Still, the two couldn’t shake the idea of Joker 2 being a stage production, and they toyed with the idea of making Phoenix’s dream come true in a more intimate setting.

“We thought about doing it at the Carlyle as sort of a smaller thing,” Phillips said. But that’s when the COVID pandemic hit the world and made the idea of Arthur Fleck’s stage debut downright impossible.

That pandemic is just one reason why Joker 2 is coming out half a decade after the first movie, but once Phoenix and Phillips were committed to making another theatrical sequel, Warner Bros. was happy to make their new dream come true.

Honestly, the beleaguered studio was likely already dreaming of a sequel: the DCEU might have crashed and burned, but the first Joker film (which was notably outside that cinematic universe) earned over a billion dollars at the box office. Such profits are nothing to laugh at, and hopes are high that this musical sequel can top the Hollywood charts yet again.  

Joker 2 being a musical featuring Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn is an idea so crazy that it just might work, and there is something appropriate about all of this starting with Joaquin Phoenix’s dream.

The actor has always taken creative risks by following his dreams, and those decisions have made him one of the world’s most acclaimed actors. This film may be his greatest creative risk yet, and the fact that the actor keeps taking these big swings will always be enough to put a smile on our faces.

Source: Variety