‘Joker’: Deleted Scene Would Have Confirmed Fate Of Zazie Beetz’s Sophie

Joker Zazie Beetz Joaquin Phoenix


Joker director Todd Phillips revealed the fate of Zazie Beetz’s Sophie was made clear in a deleted scene.

Throughout Joker, Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck develops a relationship with a neighbor named Sophie, who is portrayed by Zazie Beetz. However, the audience later learns that the relationship was imagined by Arthur during a scene in which Zazie Beetz’s Sophie discovers Fleck in her living room with no knowledge of who he is or why he would be there.

The scene concluded on an ominous note that left many audience members uncertain as to whether or not the unwell Arthur Fleck murdered Zazie Beetz’s Sophie, but director Todd Philips himself confirmed the character’s fate during an interview with IndieWire. As Todd Phillips explained, Joker originally featured a cutaway to Zazie Beetz’s Sophie watching Arthur Fleck’s interview on Murray Franklin’s talk show, but the director decided to cut the shot for reasons that included keeping the film solely from Fleck’s perspective. For those who felt the fate of Zazie Beetz’s Sophie was unclear, Todd Phillips confirmed she survived the film and explained that this incarnation of the Joker only harms those who have wronged him:

“He doesn’t kill her, definitively. As the filmmaker and the writer I am saying he doesn’t kill her. We like the idea that it’s almost like a litmus test for the audience to say, ‘how crazy is he?’ Most people that I’ve spoken to think he didn’t kill her because they understand the idea that he only kills people that did him wrong. She had nothing to do with it. Most people understood that, even as a villain, he was living by a certain code. Of course he didn’t kill this woman down the hall.”

Were you among those who assumed Zazie Beetz’s Sophie survived or did you think it was possible that she was killed by the Joker? Let us know below!

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 fracturedsociety. 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.

Joker is now playing in theaters!

Source: IndieWire

Sebastian Peris

Sebastian Peris

Canadian film buff, political junkie, comic book geek, and board game enthusiast.