New Joker trailer reveals more of Joaquin Phoenix's mad clown
Arthur Fleck is back.
The second trailer for Joker has arrived and fills in some of the grim world created by director Todd Phillips for his Batman supervillain origin story.
Three-time Oscar nominee Joaquin Phoenix (who reportedly lost around 50 pounds for the role) plays the nascent Joker as a mentally ill and impoverished struggling stand-up comedian at odds with society.
“It really came from this idea: what if you just did a comic-book movie differently?” Phillips says in a new Los Angeles Times interview. “We all grew up on these character studies and they’re few and far between nowadays. So it was like, ‘Let’s do a deep dive on one of these guys in a real way.’ No one is going to fly in it. No buildings are going to collapse. It’s just going to be on the ground, so to speak.”
“That’s the fun thing about these characters,” he added. “In a way, comic books are our Shakespeare and just like there are many versions of Hamlet and Macbeth, they’ve done four or five versions of the Joker in the last 25 or 30 years. So why not do another one that’s wildly different?”
Also starring in the film is Robert De Niro as a hammy talk show inspired by his 1982 film The King of Comedy and Brett Cullen plays Thomas Wayne, a billionaire philanthropist running for mayor of Gotham, and father to the Joker’s eventual nemesis Bruce.
Joker arrives in theaters Oct. 4, 2019. Ahead of that release date, the film will screen at both the Venice and Toronto film festivals.
Here’s the previous teaser trailer:
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