white pit bull mix he rescued from eutha-
nasia 13 years ago. Soda has an allergy to
direct sunlight, which means she must be
kept out of the sun from nine to ve. Phoe-
nix bought her a specially made suit to go
to the beach. “She looks so fucking cool
but she doesn’t like it,” he says.
He lives with Mara, who in addition to
playing his ex-wife in Her was Mary
Magdalene to Phoenix’s Jesus Christ in
the Garth Davis–directed Mary Mag-
dalene. (“Obviously it’s a part I was just
born to play,” Phoenix says dryly.) He
believed Mara despised him during the
making of Her but later learned she was
just shy and actually liked him too. “She’s
the only girl I ever looked up on the inter-
net,” he says. “We were just friends,
email friends. I’d never done that. Never
looked up a girl online.”
Phoenix has recently undergone hyp-
nosis to quit smoking, a habit he took up
as a teenager, but it doesn’t seem to be
working out. His ngernails are chewed
to nubs and he keeps two packs of Ameri-
can Spirits and several lighters close at
hand. “I eat really healthy,” he says. “I
don’t really like junk food. I don’t like pro-
cessed foods. Right? But I still can—like,
I’ll fuck up a bag of chips. Like a fuckin’
Subway sandwich and shit.”
For Joker, he went on an extremely
restrictive diet—advised by the same doc-
tor who helped him lose weight for The
Master—and lost 52 pounds. After the lm,
he gained back 25, but the oily image of his
severe, wraithlike body in the trailer for
Joker arrived like a shock last spring, evi-
dence that Phoenix had once again gone
all in on a role. As Arthur Fleck, Phoenix
leans into his physical features, from the
scar on his upper lip (not a surgically xed
cleft, he says, but a nonsurgical scar he
was born with) to his leonine gaze, sad-
sack grin, and distended shoulder, which
he was also born with. Phillips told him he
looked like “one of those birds from the
Gulf of Mexico that they’re rinsing the tar
o.” “He’s got the most interesting form,”
he says. “He’s so beautiful.”
Phillips, who directed the comedies Old
School and the Hangover series, pitched
the idea of a Joker movie to Warner Bros.
as a kind of anti-superhero lm, with prac-
tically no CGI eects or cartoonish plots,
but instead a dark realism drained of
heroics. Phillips had found it increasingly
dicult, he says, to make comedies in the
new “woke” Hollywood, and his brand
of irreverent bro humor has lost favor.
“Go try to be funny nowadays with
this woke culture,” he says. “There were
articles written about why comedies don’t
work anymore—I’ll tell you why, because
all the fucking funny guys are like, ‘Fuck
this shit, because I don’t want to oend
you.’ It’s hard to argue with 30 million
people on Twitter. You just can’t do it,
right? So you just go, ‘I’m out.’ I’m out, and
you know what? With all my comedies—I
think that what comedies in general all
have in common—is they’re irreverent.
So I go, ‘How do I do something irrever-
ent, but fuck comedy? Oh I know, let’s
take the comic book movie universe and
turn it on its head with this.’ And so that’s
really where that came from.”
The result is a drama that doubles as a
critique of Hollywood: an alienated white
guy whose failure to be funny drives him
into a vengeful rage. With co-screenwriter
Scott Silver, Phillips conceived an origin
story for the Joker as a for-hire party
clown and mentally ill loner in a late ’70s/
early ’80s Gotham, drawing from the
lmic palette of classics like Taxi Driver,
The King of Comedy, and One Flew Over
the Cuckoo’s Nest. He says he conceived
the character with Phoenix in mind and
gave him the script in late 2017. What fol-
lowed was four months of conversations
at Phoenix’s canyon house. Phoenix que-
ried Phillips endlessly before he joined
the lm—part of his process, it turns out,
which also included asking his mother to
examine the script. In pitching the movie
to Phoenix, Phillips told him he needed to
think of the lm as a heist movie.
“What are you talking about?” Phoe-
nix asked, confused. “There’s barely any
action in it.”
Phillips cracked, “We’re gonna take
$55 million from Warner Bros. and do
whatever the hell we want.”
For Phoenix, the decision was more
personal.
“To me, there was a period of time when
we think about all those great lms from
the ’70s, it wasn’t a genre,” says Phoenix.
“It wasn’t like, this is a drama. It was just
a movie. Like Dog Day Afternoon is, like,
intense, heartbreaking, and fucking funny.A FLECK OF
HIS FORMER SELF
Phoenix went on
an extremely
restrictive diet and
lost 52 pounds to
play Arthur Fleck. He
later gained back 25.100 VANITY FAIR