Joaquin Phoenix Joker Almost Happened Much, Much Earlier
Long before Folie a Deux made history as one of the worst superhero films in Hollywood history, Joaquin Phoenix impressed us all with the first Joker film. The movie made over a billion dollars at the box office and helped its star take home the Academy Award for Best Actor, making many wonder why Warner Bros. didn’t put this acclaimed actor in the clown makeup earlier. As it turns out, they nearly did: Joaquin Phoenix casually mentioned that he spoke with superstar director Christopher Nolan about potentially playing the Joker in The Dark Knight but wasn’t yet ready to play the famous villain.
Joaquin Phoenix Could’ve Played Joker In The Dark Knight
This shocking revelation came up during the star’s recent appearance on Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin. During the interview, Joaquin Phoenix was candid that he doesn’t remember exactly why he didn’t get the Joker role…he said, ‘“I remember I talked to Chris Nolan about The Dark Knight and that didn’t happen for whatever reason.” While he elaborated a bit more about his involvement with Nolan, Phoenix summed things up with a simple statement: “I wasn’t ready then.”
Over the course of the interview, Joaquin Phoenix was equally candid in examining why he wasn’t ready to play the Joker in the hit 2008 film: “That’s one of those things where it’s like, ‘What is in me that’s not doing this?” he asked. Sounding a bit cryptic, he noted that “it’s not about me” and concluded that “there’s something else” that was holding him back from embracing this iconic villain years earlier.
Praise For Heath Ledger
Eventually, Joaquin Phoenix answered his own question by addressing the elephant in the room: namely, that Heath Ledger ultimately portrayed the Joker in The Dark Knight and gave what would be (quite literally, sadly) the performance of a lifetime. It may just be the benefit of hindsight, but Phoenix mused that the reason he hesitated to portray the villain, saying, “There’s another person who is going to do something.” He then said what you’ve probably been thinking this entire time: “I can’t imagine what it would be if we didn’t have Heath Ledger’s performance in that film.”
Lest anyone think he was suggested that he should have gotten the role instead of Ledger (who posthumously won the Academy Award for Best Actor), Phoenix clarified his memory was fuzzy enough that he was unsure whether Nolan wanted to cast him in the role. “I don’t know whether Christopher Nolan was coming to me saying, ‘You’re definitely the person,” he admitted. Noting his certainty that they at least met to discuss the film and the role, Phoenix pointed out that the director may have had his own reservations: “My feeling was I shouldn’t do this, but maybe he also was like, ‘He’s not the guy.’”
The Right Timing
For as obviously talented as Joaquin Phoenix is (he also took home the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of the Joker), we can’t help but be glad that he didn’t play Batman’s nemesis in The Dark Knight. Ledger’s Clown Prince was a success because he was everything Phoenix’s Joker was not: bold, theatrical, and impishly confrontational. Assuming Phoenix had gotten the role and the script was unchanged, we would have gotten the worst of both worlds…a performance that is a pale shadow of both Ledger’s work in The Dark Knight and Phoenix’s later work in Joker.
Plus, given the immense failure of Joker 2 compared to the Oscar-winning, billion-dollar success of the first movie, it might be time for us all to admit something uncomfortable: that first Joker film was a lucky fluke, one whose success speaks to how much younger audiences were ready for a Taxi Driver remake with a star in clown makeup. Joaquin Phoenix is immensely talented and his first Joker performance remains iconic, but the sequel’s failure proves just how little talent matters when the script is this bad. The title was quite accurate, as this was a folie a deux…a folly shared by both Phoenix and Phillips.
Source: Variety
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