How did Joaquin Phoenix get the part of the Joker?
At no point in his career had Joaquin Phoenix shown any interest in becoming a blockbuster leading man, which is why it came as such a surprise that he agreed to star as one of the most iconic and indelible characters in pop culture.
Comic book adaptations have been the hottest trend in Hollywood for more than 20 years, and the Joker is the most iconic villain to have ever opposed any costumed crimefighter. Roles don’t come with a much higher profile, which was the exact opposite of the path Phoenix had been carving out for himself.
He’d flirted with the idea in the past, most notably when he was in negotiations to play Doctor Strange in the Marvel Cinematic Universe before ruling himself out of the running and paving the way for Benedict Cumberbatch to spend the last decade waving his hands around in front of a green screen, so it was obvious something about Joker had piqued his interest.
From the outside looking in, it was obvious why it had captured his imagination. It might have been a story focusing on a guy who dyes his hair green, paints his face like a clown, and lives in Gotham City, but it was unlike any other Batman-adjacent film that had ever been made.
Inspired more by Martin Scorsese than superheroes, Todd Phillips took his cues from Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy to make Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck the focal point of a twisted character study that immediately separated his film from any other Joker movies and, by extension, from other Joker actors.
Things were at least made a little easier perception-wise when Phoenix was tasked to pick up the baton from Suicide Squad‘s Jared Leto and not The Dark Knight‘s Heath Ledger, even if the result was a familiar one when the new Joker did exactly what his most formidable predecessor had done by winning an Academy Award.
In fact, after scooping his ‘Best Actor’ prize for Joker, the ‘Clown Prince of Crime’ followed in the footsteps of Vito Corleone by becoming just the second character to ever give rise to a pair of Oscar-winning performances from two different actors, another feather in the cap for Batman’s arch-nemesis.
Not only that, but after Jack Nicholson, Ledger, Leto, and Phoenix got their hands on an Oscar, Barry Keoghan is the only star to have played the role in a live-action feature who doesn’t have at least one ‘Golden Baldie’ to their name, but there’s plenty of time left for him to join that illustrious club.
After swearing off spectacle and spandex for so long, Phoenix reached the pinnacle of the industry when he was finally convinced to take the plunge, but how did he end up in that position in the first place?
How was Joaquin Phoenix cast as the Joker?
Despite his disinterest in the superhero space, Phoenix had actually been chasing a role like Arthur Fleck years before the film was even a twinkle in Todd Phillips’ eye and well prior to Joker releasing in 2019.
When big-name characters are being cast in comic book flicks, countless names are bandied around as potential candidates, but Phillips admitted that once Phoenix initially entered his mind, nobody else was even under consideration.
That was especially fortuitous, with the actor confirming to Collider in the summer of 2018 that it was precisely the kind of part he’d been looking for: “Three or four years ago, I called my agent and said, ‘Why don’t they want to take one of these characters and just make a lower budget film about it, a movie but a character study, and why not take one of the villains?'”
“And I thought, ‘You can’t do the Joker, because, you know, it’s just you can’t do that character, it’s just been done’. So I was trying to think of other characters, and he said, ‘I’ll set up a general meeting with Warner Bros’. And I said, ‘I’m not gonna go, I can’t go to a general meeting,'” he explained. “So I completely forgot about it, and so then I heard about this idea, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s so exciting, that’s the kind of experience I wanted to have, with a movie based on a comic character’. I felt like you could get something onscreen.”
He wanted to play a different kind of comic book character, Phillips just so happened to be developing a movie about a different kind of comic book character, creating a perfect storm of circumstance that led Phoenix directly into Joker‘s title role.
