After wasting Todd Haynes’ time and, subsequently, the precious time of Joker: Folie À Deux‘s meager audience, Joaquin Phoenix is now just talking about other, better Jokers he may have almost played. Appearing on Rick Rubin’s perfectly pronounceable Tetragrammaton podcast, Phoenix claimed that he and Christopher Nolan had talked about him playing the Joker in The Dark Knight way back when. Per Phoenix, it “didn’t happen for whatever reason.”
That “whatever reason” exists somewhere between “I wasn’t ready then” and Nolan thinking, “Maybe he’s not the guy.” Having not yet mastered the art of bending backward with a cigarette in his mouth, Phoenix sensed that maybe fate had a different path for Mr. J, who has become something of a King Lear-esque role for characters who come up with circus-themed plans to kill the Batman. He continued, “That’s one of those things where it’s like, ‘What is in me that’s not doing this?’ There’s something else. There’s another person who is going to do something. I can’t imagine what it would be if we didn’t have Ledger’s performance in that film, right?”
Phoenix says he doesn’t know whether Nolan was saying he’s “definitely the person” because he “can’t remember the context of how we met.” However, he knows that they did meet, and his “feeling was I shouldn’t do this, but maybe [Nolan] also was like, ‘He’s not the guy.'”
Phoenix won an Oscar for playing the Clown Prince of Crime, the Joker, becoming the second actor to do so, following Ledger’s posthumous honors in 2009. He has since played a diminished Joker who spends most of his time emptying chamber pots in a sequel, Folie À Deux, which was less successful but does feature a character who evokes the cheek-slicing spirit of Ledger’s Joker. Earlier this month, The Hollywood Reporter reported that director Todd Phillips wanted to feature a character who carved a smile into his face in his 2019 Oscar-nominated movie about how the Joker is crazy. Christopher Nolan reportedly put the kibosh on that for obvious reasons. However, because Nolan had left Warner Bros. for Universal before production on the sequel, he wasn’t around to stop Phillips in 2024, so we find ourselves with a new Joker movie with a bad ending.
As for the Tetragrammaton podcast, Phoenix joins an elite list of guests, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and, more recently, Alfred Hitchcock, resurrected through the magic of technology (we assume AI). So yeah, plenty of normal stuff is happening on the Tetragrammaton podcast, such as a very wealthy man fucking around with ChatGPT.
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