Joaquin Phoenix’s dodges answers at ‘Joker 2’ presser in Venice

Author of the article:

Washington Post

Jada Yuan, The Washington Post

Published Sep 05, 2024  •  7 minute read

Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix in "Joker: Folie à Deux." Photo by Courtesy of Warner Bros. Picture /Courtesy of Warner Bros. Picture

VENICE – News conferences are like being in a symbiotic relationship over which you have no control. Reporters are at the mercy of the moderator to call on them, or simply have to hope other reporters in the room will be of similar mind and ask the question – particularly the thorny question – that will actually be newsworthy.

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The hero award for the Venice Film Festival thus goes to Ben Dalton of Screen International at the news conference for “Joker: Folie a Deux,” which premiered Wednesday night, who took the microphone to ask Joaquin Phoenix why he dropped out of Todd Haynes’s untitled NC-17 gay love story in August, just days before production was set to begin in Guadalajara, Mexico.

“If I do (explain), I’ll just be sharing my opinion from my perspective, and the other creatives aren’t here to say their piece, and it just doesn’t feel like that would be right,” Phoenix said after a long pause. “I am not sure how that would be helpful. I don’t think I will.”

Perhaps Phoenix’s quitting of a project he helped develop doesn’t seem like that big of a deal from the outside. But in Hollywood, it’s a cloud hanging over the splashy release of the “Joker” sequel (which introduces Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn, or “Lee” as she’s called in the film, as the deranged love interest to Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck) that has tarnished Phoenix’s reputation and puts his chances for a second best actor Oscar in jeopardy. As IndieWire first reported, Haynes called Phoenix the project’s “driving force.” They worked together to develop the explicit gay romance set in the 1930s, meant to co-star Danny Ramirez of “Top Gun: Maverick,” and it would have been Phoenix’s first gay on-screen role.

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It’s essentially the equivalent of building a company based on your idea, that requires your unique persona to launch it, and then after all the money has been poured in and tons of people have devoted months of their lives to getting it off the ground, deciding you’d rather not be involved.

A source close to the production told Variety that Phoenix may have gotten “cold feet,” and crew members have speculated that he got spooked by just how explicit the sex scenes were. One studio executive told the Hollywood Reporter that there was “outrage” over the situation, and both THR and Matthew Belloni at Puck reported that producers were considering suing Phoenix for the financial losses.

By dropping out, the 49-year-old actor, who is engaged to Rooney Mara, left the project without a bankable star, and with no time to reverse course and recast, particularly because he’d already been so integral in working out the role. Former New York Times film critic Janet Maslin called Phoenix “now-uninsurable” on X and suggested Colin Farrell as a replacement. Film critic Glenn Kenny also posted, “If (Phoenix) thinks the rest of the film industry will take his f—ing over Todd Haynes at all lightly I believe he is mistaken.”

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Even the Venice Film Festival seems to have been wrapped up in the drama: The “Folie a Deux” premiere was unusually late for such a hugely anticipated movie, in a festival that has been going on for a week already. The Wednesday premiere butts up against the traditional start of the Toronto International Film Festival, and members of the film industry and the international press corps who were planning to fly straight there had to change their flights. When Venice was creating its programming schedule, the festival would have been coordinating with Phoenix’s team during his intended Haynes shoot in Mexico. (The festival did not return a request for comment.)

The controversy has put a pallor over what should be a triumphant return for the actor and director Todd Phillips. The original “Joker” film’s shocking win of the Golden Lion here set in motion its 11 Oscar nominations and wins for best original score and Phoenix for best actor. Not to mention its $1 billion box office, making it the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time, until “Deadpool & Wolverine” surpassed it this year. “I think it’s a lot easier to come into something as the insurgent as opposed to coming in as the incumbent,” Phillips said at the news conference. “There’s definitely a sense of more nervousness than I had in the first one.”

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The nerves are warranted. The new film is, essentially, a musical set inside the head of a mentally ill murderer of six as he lives a miserable existence in jail, transforms into a cult hero through his televised trial that may end in the death penalty, and falls into a volatile, combative love with Gaga’s Lee. Early reviews of the movie, which hits U.S. theatres Oct. 4, have been dismal.

Both Arthur and Lee regularly break out, in broken, warbly voices, into a ’50s and ’60s soundtrack – Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon’s “That’s Life” – with lyrics that somehow meet the moment of whatever they’re trying to express.

Even though Phoenix wasn’t quite ready to leave the character behind, the director also knew he wouldn’t do a reprise if it felt anything like what he’d done before. “If we were really going to do it, it had to scare him in the same way the first one did,” Phillips said. “It had to feel audacious.”

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The first film, a dark origin story of the disturbed loner who’d become Batman’s archenemy, owed its success to the DC Comics brand and controversy that surrounded it – such as Homeland Security issuing a warning of potential mass shootings at screenings, or outcry that it was glorifying “incel” culture. Centred on a disenfranchised White man who feels like the system has let him down and who begins to enact an angry, violent rebellion, it felt like a mirror of American society heading into the 2020 election.

The new film features a poignant waltz and a dream sequence in which the leads play a murderous Sonny and Cher – and seems like it might be harder to sell to the die-hard comic book fans and male audiences who watched its predecessor on repeat. Its timeliness is a little more under the surface, but its biggest crowd scenes, with hundreds of extras playing pro-Joker acolytes, were filmed outside the New York State Supreme Court, just steps away from the Donald Trump indictment hearings in March 2023.

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The idea, Phillips said, came out of the uninhibited dance on that iconic Bronx staircase that Phoenix’s Joker does in the first movie. “Something that Joaquin and I talked about all the time on the set of the first movie was this idea that Arthur has music in him,” Phillips said. For this film, when they knew Arthur would have a “Lady Joker,” Gaga quickly came to mind, as did the idea of choosing standards that Arthur would have listened to with his mom when he was younger. They might be the only musical references he had, because his experience with the outside world was so limited.

Phoenix said he started off trying to sing like Frank Sinatra or Sammy Davis Jr., but that felt too smooth for Arthur. As soon as they brought Gaga on, he said, “She was like, ‘Oh, we’re going to sing live.’ And I said, ‘No, we’re not. You can sing live if you like.’ But, well … it was really the only way.”

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Gaga hesitated to call the film a “musical,” noting that music is used to “really give the characters a way to express what they need to say, because the scene and just the dialogue is not enough.”

Phoenix was kind to the press, warmly greeting the room and giving generous, descriptive answers, but it was clear that there were places he wouldn’t go. He politely refused when Phillips asked him to tell the room about a dream he had that led to the second film, and only talked about it once a reporter asked him again, point-blank.

“I had this dream I was performing as Joker, doing songs, and I just called Todd because I thought there might be something there, and there wasn’t.” (Apparently there was something there, because Phillips told the story in a Variety profile and said the dream was his inspiration.)

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For the first film, he’d lost an incredible 52 pounds, and this time he looked just as skeletal, if not more so. One shot in the beginning, in jail, makes his left shoulder blade look like a fin.

But he didn’t want to talk about that, either. “It’s not really that dangerous. I worked with a doctor. Thank you for the question,” he said, refusing to divulge any specifics. The only thing harder this go-round were the many dance rehearsals.

“We fed him blueberries when he was hungry,” Gaga said.

While the first film seems like a Joker origin story, this second film feels like some combination of the big movie musical moments of “Singin’ in the Rain” and the macabre dissonance of “Sweeney Todd,” mixed with a “Network”-like commentary on tabloid courtroom television, as Joker’s legion of fans grows even bigger as his trial airs.

Phillips doesn’t deny that there are Trump parallels to this movie.

“Think what you want to about Trump, but for the certain segment of society that’s in love with him, he’s a guy who’s just saying what he wants to say and doing what he wants to do,” Phillips said in his Variety profile. “He is who he is, and people respond to that.”

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