Joaquin Phoenix won an Oscar for his portrayal of Joker in Todd Phillips’ 2019 film. But a little over a decade before it was released, he says he was approached about taking on the Clown Prince of Crime in Christopher Nolan‘s iconic The Dark Knight.
Phoenix sat down for Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast (below), for a more than two-hour conversation, where the actor explained that he spoke to Nolan about taking on the role of Joker years before he actually did.
“That didn’t… wasn’t going to happen for a number of reasons. I wasn’t ready then,” Phoenix said on the podcast. “That’s one of those things sometimes where you go: 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.”
He continued, “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.’ I couldn’t say.”
Ledger’s portrayal of Joker has gone down in history as one of the best in Batman lore and won him a posthumous Oscar, making him the first actor to do so in over 30 years at the time. The Dark Knight and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus marked Ledger’s final roles before he died from an accidental overdose of prescription medications in January 2008.
For his part, Phoenix withdrew from the public eye that year, as he worked on mockumentary I’m Still Here, which was released in 2010.
A decade later, the Her star was approached again to take on the role of one of Batman’s most formidable villains in Phillips’ Joker.
“To me, it was a big movie. It was like 55 million, which I think to Todd was a small movie,” Phoenix recalled. “But to me, it was a big movie. And it was what they call IP, and I’d never done that.”
He explained that because there was no obligation for a Joker sequel (despite there eventually being one with Folie à Deux) and the studio seemingly having low expectations for the film helped the actor feel more comfortable agreeing to the part. However, he was still a little hesitant.
“He was in control, and he had built a schedule that was going to allow us to play, to try things,” the Gladiator star said of Phillips. “I was like, ‘Well that is just like all I want to do, is try things, and I never really have the resources, and it’s really hard to turn that down.’ But I still was very unsure, and I struggled with it for months and months.”
Phoenix went on to portray the DC villain and won an Oscar for it as well. Joker ended up being a hit for Warner Bros. and spawned the current musical sequel that also stars Lady Gaga. It hit theaters earlier this month but did not perform as well as the first.
