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Movies & TV

19th Jan 2022

Willem Dafoe has an incredible pitch to team up with Joaquin Phoenix for Joker sequel

Rory Cashin

“I fantasised about that.”

Before Jack Nicholson, before Mark Hamill, before Heath Ledger, before (ugh) Jared Leto, and before Joaquin Phoenix, the person pictured for the role of The Joker was Willem Dafoe.

Sam Hamm, the screenwriter for Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, thought Dafoe was the perfect choice, but apparently Dafoe was never officially offered the role, as the producers also looked at Robin Williams, James Woods, John Lithgow and Tim Curry before deciding to go all-out with Jack Nicholson.

Not that missing out on the role has impacted Dafoe’s career too drastically, as he recently returned to the role of another iconic comic book villain – Norman Osborne, aka the Green Goblin, for Spider-Man: No Way Home, which is currently sitting at No.8 in the all-time box office worldwide grosses (with $1.628 billion and counting).

Throughout 2021, Dafoe also featured in several other high-profile projects – The French Dispatch, Nightmare Alley, Twelve Minutes, The Card Counter – while his 2022 looks to be just as busy, including a role in The Northman, a new revenge thriller from the director of The Witch and The Lighthouse, filmed in Ireland.

Clip via Universal Ireland

So, yeah, he’s doing well.

But the conversation of his potential as Joker still comes up every now and then, and during his conversation with GQ, that very topic came up, to which Dafoe replied with an incredible pitch:

“There is something interesting about, like, if there was a Joker imposter. So it would be possible to have not duelling Jokers but someone that says to be the Joker that isn’t the Joker.

“And that kind of opens up the possibility of an interesting story, particularly if you had Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, and then you had someone who was either imitating or riffing off what he did. I fantasised about that. But other than that I am not talking to anybody [about it], you’re the first one.”

That most recent official word on any kind of Joker sequel in the works was a little over half a year ago, when it was revealed that Todd Phillips (director and writer of the original) had struck a deal to co-write Joker 2.