Joaquin Phoenix shook the whole world in 2019 with his Oscar-winning performance in ‘Joker’. The sequel of the film may not have performed all that well at the box office, but it remains a significant performance in Phoenix’s career. However, the 2019 film wasn’t exactly his first go in the iconic franchise.
The actor recently revealed that both he and Christopher Nolan tried to secure a role for him in ‘The Dark Knight’. Here’s why that did not work out and what Phoenix said about it.
Joaquin Phoenix Believed Heath Ledger Was Better Suited To Play The Role
Joaquin Phoenix was speaking on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast when he revealed that there were several attempts made to secure a role for him in ‘The Dark Knight’ but in vain. “That didn’t… wasn’t going to happen for a number of reasons. I wasn’t ready then. That’s one of those things,” Phoenix said.
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“Why am I not doing this project? What is stopping me from doing this? Well it’s not about me, there’s something else. There’s another person that’s going to do something that’s like, I can’t imagine what it would be if we didn’t have Heath Ledger’s performance in that film,” the actor acknowledged.
“I don’t know whether Christopher Nolan was coming to me saying, ‘You are definitely the person.’ I can’t remember the context of how we met. But I know that we met, and my feeling was, I shouldn’t do this. But maybe he also was like, ‘You’re not the guy,'” the actor added.
Joaquin Phoenix Reveals How He Navigated His First IP Role In ‘Joker’
As indelible as Heath Ledger’s unprecedented performance was in Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight’ when he left it in 2008, his death left the franchise in a dilemma. Joaquin Phoenix had walked away from the limelight incidentally around the same time Ledger died.
But he returned in 2009 with a strange persona that confused fans and soon led to an infamous spot on David Letterman. All this was part of his extended performance in the mockumentary ‘I’m Still Here’ in 2010.
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Phoenix stepped into the world of “IP” for the first time when he finally played Joker in Todd Phillips’ 2019 film. “To me, it was a big movie. It was like 55 million. But to me, it was a big movie,” Phoenix admitted, noting how it felt markedly different from the small indie films he’d made throughout the 2010s with auteurs like Lynne Ramsay, Paul Thomas Anderson, and James Gray.
Phillips, however, reassured that “there was no studio expectation” for ‘Joker’, promising the freedom and control Phoenix was used to, but with a bigger budget. And that bet paid off in spades as the film became a box-office and critical smash, putting Phoenix alongside Ledger in the exclusive pantheon of actors who have won Oscars playing the same character.
