Joker: Folie à Deux’s Joaquin Phoenix Discusses Arthur’s Fate And The Controversial Ending

October 10

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Joker: Folie à Deux star Joaquin Phoenix has discussed the controversial ending to the film, saying the way things wrap up provides a “warmth” to Arthur Fleck’s character arc. This story contains massive spoilers for Joker: Folie à Deux, so only read on if you’ve seen the film or don’t care about spoilers.

At the end of the film, Arthur Fleck rejects his Joker persona and owns up to his crimes. He loses his love, Lee (Lady Gaga) in the process, as he chooses to embrace who he really is. He was never the “real” Joker. He was instead just an aspiring comic who got mixed up in something bigger than him and had the title of the Joker thrust upon him. Fleck, after confessing to his crimes, returns to Arkham where he is brutally murdered after someone in a hallway asks to tell him a joke.

There is a “warmth” to Arthur’s fate, Phoenix told IGN.

“There’s a warmth in that scene, which is nice. That’s all that I was thinking about that I was after, is here’s this young man who’s telling me a joke and he’s nervous to tell me the joke, I can tell that he’s nervous, and I’m going to hear him out. And it’s a pretty good setup,” Phoenix said.

Writer-director Todd Phillips said Arthur finally “found peace” in knowing that “it’s OK to be yourself.”

“I like to think he died at peace in a way being himself. The kid says to him, ‘You want to hear a joke?’ And even though he thinks maybe it’s (Lee) downstairs. We don’t even know what’s downstairs, but that sort of optimism that Arthur has, that’s still in him. He’s like, ‘Well, yeah, okay, of course’ because he knows that feeling of wanting to make somebody laugh,” Phillips said.

It doesn’t play out like that, of course, and Arthur is murdered “because everything goes bad for Arthur,” Phillips said. “But I always think that’s such a beautiful moment where it’s like Arthur still has hope. I think Joaquin is so beautiful in that scene. It’s such a small nothing. I mean, beyond the death thing. That moment where he’s looking at the kid and he’s kind of giving the kid a polite laugh in the setup,” Phillips said. “He’s showing appreciation for the comedy and appreciation for putting yourself out there. Something nobody ever did for him in the first movie in some ways.”

Regarding how Arthur was never the real Joker, Phillips said people simply missed the clues from the first movie, like when Arthur visits Bruce Wayne and he’s 30 years older than him. “What kind of geriatric Joker is going to fight in the future?” Phillips said.

Phillips also pointed out how the script for the first movie was called Joker, not “The Joker.” It was also labeled as “an origin story,” not “THE origin story,” Phillips said. Phillips was telling fans all those years ago that this was not the story of the “real” Joker but instead someone who got mixed up in a wider plot.

“It was this idea that maybe this isn’t THE Joker. Maybe this is the inspiration for the Joker,” he said.

He went on to also point out how it should have been obvious to viewers because Arthur was clearly never a criminal mastermind like the real Joker is. “So, it’s kind of this idea of when somebody becomes an icon, and we put things on that person as a group, as a society, as a media, as whatever. We put things on that person that maybe they can’t live up to,” he said.

Folie à Deux is making nowhere near as much money as the 2019 film, but it was never expected to. As for Phillips, after earning more than $100 million from the series, he’s leaving DC behind.

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