‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Reveals First Look at Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix Together
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. That may very well be the case here, because after a couple of months of waiting to see what Lady Gaga would look like as Harley Quinn, Todd Phillips finally posted the first-ever picture of her and Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck/Joker from the set of Joker: Folie à Deux.
Gaga was confirmed last year to be playing Joker’s girlfriend in a sequel that will also be a musical. The film has been shooting since December 10, with Phillips back as co-writer and director, and Phoenix back as the Clown Prince of Crime… sort of. A first look at Phoenix in the new film was already released when cameras started rolling:
Joaquin Phoenix in the first official picture from Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux.
The sequel will reportedly take place mostly inside Arkham Asylum. Fleck/The Joker was found to be locked away in the final scene of Joker, and the movie never made it explicitly clear if he’d been incarcerated following the events of the movie, or if he had been there all along. It’s very possible that the sequel will not answer that question either, following a similar path to how Blade Runner 2049 avoided the question of whether or not Deckard was a replicant.
Margot Robbie, the first actress to play Harley Quinn in live-action, shared her enthusiasm about Gaga taking over from her in an interview with Entertainment Tonight last month:
Gaga’s incarnation of the character will take place in a completely different universe from Margot Robbie’s, and will be part of what is now known as DC’s Elseworlds, an umbrella that will cover both Joker films from Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix, Matt Reeves’ Batman universe, and some future projects that James Gunn and Peter Safran may opt to develop aside from the main DCU timeline.
It’s currently unknown what the status of Robbie’s character will be moving forward. While Gunn is expected to establish a soft reboot of the franchise, recasting some major roles and introducing brand-new arcs for everyone involved, Robbie’s Harley coexisted with Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller, who is getting her own HBO Max series under Gunn and Safran’s supervision.
While we wait for clarification on that, we can all get excited about Joker: Folie à Deux, the sequel to a billion-dollar film that also managed to score 11 Oscar nominations and gave Joaquin Phoenix his first statuette as Best Actor. It will open in theaters on October 2, 2024.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
