Todd Phillips Tells All on Making ‘Joker 2’: Musical Numbers, Method Acting and Joaquin Phoenix’s Broadway Dream That Started It All
variety.comJoaquin Phoenix‘s dream. Shortly before shooting wrapped on “Joker,” Phoenix confessed to Todd Phillips, the filmmaker who had reimagined Batman’s greatest enemy as an aspiring stand-up with a Travis Bickle complex, that he wasn’t ready to leave the character behind.
When he fell asleep one night, Phoenix had a vision of Arthur Fleck, the man behind Joker’s clown makeup, performing onstage, telling jokes and singing. “Todd was in the wings talking to me through a headset,” Phoenix remembers. “I woke up feeling elated and called him, hoping he’d want to do a show with me.” Even before “Joker” went on to earn more than $1 billion in 2019, the pair were already thinking about a follow-up.
They discussed the prospect of taking their act to Broadway, at least until reality set in. “When we started really thinking about it, we realized it takes four years to put something like that together.
And is Joaquin really going to give six months of his life to do that every night onstage?” Phillips says. “Then we thought about doing it at the Carlyle as sort of a smaller thing.
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