Joaquin Phoenix has revealed he almost played the Joker ten years before Todd Phillip’s titular film.
The Gladiator actor, 50, starred as the Batman villain in the 2019 origin movie Joker and reprised the role alongside Lady Gaga in the recent musical Joker: Folie á Deux.
Phoenix’s performances followed on from the late Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Night, a role Phoenix was also considered for.
Speaking on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast, he reflected: “That didn’t…wasn’t going to happen for a number of reasons. I wasn’t ready then.”
Hinting he had a premonition, Phoenix continued: “Why am I not doing this project? What is stopping me from doing this? Well it’s not about me, there’s something else.”
The Her star explained: “There’s another person that’s going to do something that’s like… I can’t imagine what it would be [like] if we didn’t have Heath Ledger’s performance in that film.
“I don’t know whether Christopher Nolan was coming to me saying, ‘You are definitely the person.’ I can’t remember the context of how we met. But I know that we met, and my feeling was, I shouldn’t do this.
“But maybe he also was like, ‘You’re not the guy,’” he added.
The Joker was one of Ledger’s final film roles and was released after his death following a prescription drug overdose in 2008.
Phoenix took on the role a decade later. “To me, it was a big movie,” he told Rubin.
“It was like 55 million, which I think to [Phillips] was a small movie. But to me it was a big movie. And it was what they call IP [intellectual property], and I’d never done that.”
Joker was Phoenix’s “first studio movie in a long f***ing time” as they actor had spent the most part of the 2010s making “these $20 million movies” such as Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here and Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master.
Contrastingly to those smaller projects, Phillip’s Joker would have a large budget to play with. “It’s really hard to turn that down,” Phoenix said. “But I still was very unsure.”
Joker was nominated for 11 Oscars at the 2020 Academy Awards, including for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor, which Phoenix won – his first ever Academy Award.
Earlier in the film’s successful award season, Phoenix thanked Ledger, saying he was “standing here on the shoulders” of the star.
“I’m so full of gratitude right now,” he said at the Academy Awards. “I do not feel elevated above any of my fellow nominees or anyone in this room, because we share the same love – that’s the love of film.
“This form of expression has given me the most extraordinary life. I don’t know what I would be without it.”
