Joaquin Phoenix won the Best Actor Oscar for his work on Joker at the 92nd Academy Awards.
During tonight’s 92nd Academy Awards, Joaquin Phoenix won the Best Actor Oscar for his role as Arthur Fleck in the Todd Phillips-directed Joker movie. Joaquin Phoenix is the second actor to win an Oscar for playing the Joker, with the first being Heath Ledger, who won the award posthumously for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.
Joaquin Phoenix is the latest actor to don the Joker makeup and costume on the big screen following the likes of Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger and Jared Leto. Joker is separate from the DC Extended Universe in an effort to create new and unique storylines to expand the DC canon.
Warner Bros. tried to tap into Scorsese classics such as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull with Joker, with the Joaquin Phoenix starrer set in a gritty and grounded 1980s Gotham City. In addition to directing Joker, Todd Phillips also wrote the movie’s script with Scott Silver, the man behind the 2002 drama 8 Mile starring Eminem.
Here is the official synopsis for Joaquin Phoenix’s 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, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Bill Camp, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen, Glenn Fleshler, Douglas Hodge, Marc Maron, Josh Pais, and Shea Whigham.
