While Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson and Mark Hamill used their thespian skills to perform as the famed Clown Prince of Crime from Batman’s world, later actors who would portray the Joker are embodying the role in more method ways. On 2008’s The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger kept a journal as the character that featured chaotic pages of writing. There was talk about Jared Leto sending his castmates twisted sexual items and dead rats as gifts when he played the Joker in 2016’s Suicide Squad. And Variety is now reporting that Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga would forge their own brand of madness when portraying Arthur Fleck and Harley Quinn in Joker: Folie à Deux.

Todd Phillips recently told the publication that their goal for Joker: Folie à Deux was “to make it feel like it was made by crazy people. The inmates are running the asylum.” Lady Gaga, who portrays Arthur’s new beau in the film, told Vanity Fair, “We’d very often meet in Joaquin’s trailer and sometimes we would just tear the script up and start all over. It was a really cool, liberating process.” Phillips corroborated Gaga’s story, saying, “My line about Joaquin is that he’s the tunnel at the end of the light. You think, ‘Okay, this scene works, let’s just go shoot it.’ And Joaquin’s like, ‘No, no, no, let’s just have a quick meeting about it,’ and it’s three hours later and you’re rewriting it on a napkin. What’s great about Lady Gaga is that she really holds her own, both off camera when we’re in the trailer tearing things apart — which she probably spent the night before learning — but also on camera. It was not a small feat.”

Phillips continues, “She puts herself around very powerful people. I mean, Bradley Cooper, to be across from him out of the gate. To be across from Adam Driver [in ‘House of Gucci’], who is a beast, and Joaquin who’s a beast. She’s in it — she went full in.”

The unpredictable reworking of the movie may have been a factor in what led early reviews to be very divisive. saying David Ehrlich of IndieWire tore into the film, saying Joker: Folie à Deux is “boring, flat, and a criminal waste of Lady Gaga.” Adding, Phillips’ Joker sequel feels “bad on purpose.” In his review, Ehrlich writes, “At a time when everything is consumed as entertainment, no matter how tragic, Phillips has created a corporate pop spectacle that all but demands to be seen as something else. Here is a movie that perversely denies audiences everything they’ve been conditioned to want from it; gently at first, and then later with the unmistakable hostility of a knife to the gut. And that, more than anything else, is why Folie à Deux adopts the form of a classic musical: Because no other genre makes it so easy to appreciate all the fun you’re not having.”

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