While Heath Ledger gave an iconic performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight in one of his final film roles before his death, Joaquin Phoenix did not feel compelled to imitate his performance for the Joker standalone film.
Entertainment Weekly reports that Joaquin Phoenix spoke at the Venice International Film Festival to discuss Joker shortly after the film was screened. When asked about his inspiration for his performance, he noted that one thing he wanted to do was not imitate any previous performance involving the character – including the version portrayed by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight.
“The attraction to make this film and this character was that we were going to approach it in our own way, so, for me, I didn’t refer to any past iterations of the character. It just felt like something that was our creation in some ways.”
Heath Ledger died of cardiac arrest caused by accidental drug intoxication shortly before the release The Dark Knight, with his death being widely mourned by his co-stars and Hollywood as a whole. Heath Ledger’s performance in that film is considered one of the best performances put into a a comic book movie, and netted him a posthumous Oscar win – the only time that that’s ever happened with an actor in a superhero movie. The movie was not Heath Ledger’s final performance, as his incomplete work for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was utilized, with Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell being used as subsequent transformations of the character initially played by Heath Ledger.
Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix were good friends in real life, so it seems kind of fitting that the two would end up playing the same iconic character in two completely separate imaginings of the Batman villain. While Joaquin Phoenix’s version of the villain shares some traits with Heath Ledger’s take, both are completely separate interpretations of the character and are unique in their own right. So far, Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker film has been met with praise with its premiere, with most acclaim going toward his performance as the future Batman archnemesis, with some going so far as to suggest that it rivals Heath Ledger’s own performance.
Here is the official synopsis for Joker:
Director Todd Phillips’ Joker centers around the iconic arch nemesis and is an original, standalone fictional story not seen before on the big screen. Phillips’ exploration of Arthur Fleck, who is indelibly portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, is of a man struggling to find his way in Gotham’s fractured society. A clown-for-hire by day, he aspires to be a stand-up comic at night…but finds the joke always seems to be on him. Caught in a cyclical existence between apathy and cruelty, Arthur makes one bad decision that brings about a chain reaction of escalating events in this gritty character study.
Directed by Todd Phillips from a script he co-wrote with Scott Silver, Joker stars Joaquin Phoenix, Zazie Beetz, Bill Camp, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen, Glenn Fleshler, Douglas Hodge, Marc Maron, Josh Pais, and Shea Whigham.
Joker will be released in theaters on October 4, 2019.
Source: Entertainment Weekly