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A CHARACTER UNMASKED
How thoughtful direction, masterful acting and craft helped Joaquin Phoenix become both Arthur and Joker
By JOY GOHRING
“What happens when you go through life wearing a mask ... pretending?” asks director Todd Phillips.
“Joker” protagonist Arthur Fleck starts out sad and shy, slouching along weary and wilted. This perfectly reflects an early note Phillips gave star Joaquin Phoenix — that Arthur walks with “heavy shoes,” carrying the weight of the world.
That countenance ensures what Phillips calls “the shadow self” stays contained. But the indifference and cruelty of the world chip away, and when Arthur’s guard finally shatters, what emerges is Joker, a person so malevolent it’s hard to believe he and Arthur — a man who only longs for love and kindness — occupy the same flesh and bones.
That dichotomy was aided by Phoenix’s own physical evolution, in which the actor lost 52 pounds in order to personify a gaunt, lonely man seeking connection in a world lacking empathy.
Phillips saw the character as lean from the outset, and Phoenix fully immersed himself in the idea of Arthur having a skeletal frame. The director recalls the star quipping, “I got it — I’ll just stop eating and starve myself.”
The drastic weight loss helped him become more aware of his body. It lent an unfamiliar lightness that allowed Phoenix to saunter and contort in new ways and, in the film’s iconic “bathroom scene,” finally settle into the balletic movements that showcase Joker’s metamorphic arrival.
The character’s physicality is also evoked in his reflexive, almost maniacal laughter. Uncontrollable chortling is now a recognized medical syndrome, but back in 1981, says Phillips, “it was not really diagnosed, though it was a real condition.
“We talked a lot about who would Arthur be and why is he like this — what is his thing, and where does that laugh really come from?” says the director. “Joker is a narcissist, but he’s an egoless narcissist in our mind. You know, the ego is Arthur — the ego is the thing that’s trying to control this wild horse that is Joker, but Joker is pure id.”
in new ways.
Phoenix was relentless in landing on Joker’s painful cachinnation. He studied videos of people with uncontrollable laughter disorders and kept testing out different pitches and rhythms. Eventually he landed on the timbre that best suited Arthur, though the search continued even into the film’s shooting stage.
Costumes added another layer to the character. Phillips notes that wardrobe for actors is akin to putting on a skin, and costume designer Mark Bridges’ choices helped Phoenix personify both Arthur and Joker. Early in the film, Arthur is dressed as a frail, Chaplinesque clown, but sometimes it’s the man who makes the clothes and not the other way around.
As Arthur dons a two-piece maroon suit with shoulder pads to take the stage at a comedy club, he seems almost pathetic. But when the same suit is worn as Joker, as he dances onto the stage at “Live with Murray Franklin,” the change is striking. “This time it’s all put together, with a nice waistcoat and a ’70s line,” Bridges says.
In this moment, Arthur’s transformation from a man stumbling through life to the fully realized Joker is captured in his confident dance onstage, as the id fully takes over. Phoenix says it was choreographer Michael Arnold who helped school him on the evolution of movement and dance, and the actor was particularly affected by a 1957 TV performance of “The Old Soft Shoe.”
Phoenix soaked up the research, eager to viscerally capture the vastly divergent halves of the character’s whole, but the evolution wasn’t like throwing a switch. “All the preparation disappears into the performance,” says Phillips of his star’s genius. “There’s not one moment where you see him switch from Arthur to Joker.”
