Actors who have been able to play The Joker on screen usually become synonymous with the role. Jack Nicholson made the character famous back in Tim Burton’s Batman, while Joaquin Phoenix and the late Heath Ledger both took home Oscars for playing the Crown Prince of Crime on screen in separate movies. Even Mark Hamill gets love for lending his voice to The Joker in animated form. So what happened to Jared Leto? The actor’s take on The Joker for 2017’s Suicide Squad movie is divisive, though fans of the movie will argue that his performance was hacked up by a studio who ruined David Ayer’s final cut. (#ReleaseTheAyerCut) Now, however, Leto’s getting another shot.
Jared Leto will portray The Joker in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, an anticipated cut of the lost Justice League movie that was supposed to come out back in 2017. Leto’s Joker wasn’t originally part of the Justice League movie, but Snyder was able to conduct additional photography, giving Leto the chance to reprise his villainous role. FOX 32 entertainment reporter and ReelBlend co-host Jake Hamilton interviewed Leto over the weekend and asked him how it felt to play Mr. J again, to which Leto replied:
Well, Zack Snyder, he’s a warrior, he’s a madman. I really love him. With every character I play, I don’t know if it’s because I work so intently and I tend to dig really deep and put a lot of time and energy into it, but when I’m done playing the part, I do miss them a little bit… So it’s nice to revisit things.
We think we know what The Joker’s role in the movie will be, but we will keep it secret for fear of possibly spoiling what could be an awesome scene if Zack Snyder pulls it off. The director has plenty of time. He teased fans over the weekend that the cut of Justice League that he’s bringing to HBO Max in March will run four hours, meaning he was able to work in SO MUCH material that fans haven’t seen. Also, the 2017 release that went to theaters was reshot, with somewhere in the vicinity of 80-90% of the footage reworked by replacement director Joss Whedon. This version will be a whole new, and much longer, Justice League.
Elaborating further on the ability to return to a part, Jared Leto talked about the enormous amounts of preparation that went into Suicide Squad, and also his latest film, The Little Things, also coming to HBO Max. Leto told Jake Hamilton:
Parts like the Joker, like Sparma, what’s really great about those roles is yeah, they can be intense and dark, but there’s a lot of freedom and abandon there. And that’s truly fun for me, it’s fun for the other actors, it’s fun for the crew. And with both of those roles, there was lots of laughter on the set and a lot of joy because you would improvise and say something really funny. So it’s always a lot of fun when you can hear cracking up on the other side of the camera, and I like that quite a bit.
Laughing? At the Joker? I guess that’s on brand. We will see what Jared Leo and Zack Snyder make of The Joker when The Snyder Cut of Justice League opens in March.
