Five years after the release of the first Joker — which made over $1 billion and won Joaquin Phoenix an Oscar — the sequel has now arrived and is expected to be the end of the supervillain road for writer-director Todd Phillips.
Joker: Folie à Deux sees Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck meeting the love of his life, Harley Quinn (played by Lady Gaga), while incarcerated at Arkham State Hospital and awaiting trial for his crimes as Joker. At the film’s Los Angeles premiere on Monday, Phillips admitted that he was nervous to go out to Gaga for the role, but she was quickly on board.
“I think we sent her half the script, and she texted me pretty quickly that she was really into it, that she loved it and everything you want to hear,” the filmmaker told The Hollywood Reporter. “And then I went out to her house, and we met about what it was going to be, the rest of it, because we hadn’t written it yet. [Co-writer] Scott Silver and I are notoriously slow writers.”
Asked if he would ever want to do a standalone film for Gaga’s character, Phillips noted, “It’s not really where this movie is headed for me. I feel like my time in the DC Universe was these two films,” after previously saying he was not interested in doing a Joker 3. The director previously helmed The Hangover trilogy and 2016’s War Dogs.
For her part, Gaga dove deep into becoming the Joker’s famous counterpart, creating companion album Harlequin to coincide with the film’s release.
“I think that creatively exploring this music and this character was a really special experience,” she told THR of the album. “It was a navigation around some private dark moments in my life that I might not have really wanted to share and in this arena and in this film and in this story, it was just like the perfect place to put everything.”
Joker: Folie à Deux hits theaters on Friday.
Tiffany Taylor contributed to this report.
