Brendan Gleeson joins Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie À Deux
We don't know who he's playing, but what more do need beyond Lady Gaga and the Joker?
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What do you do when you’ve already got two perfect pieces to a puzzle and you still need to build out the rest of the puzzle? That’s the predicament that director Todd Phillips is in with his Joker sequel, Joker: Folie À Deux, now that he has Joaquin Phoenix as the Clown Prince Of Crime and Lady Gaga as… an unnamed love interest who will probably be based on Harley Quinn even if she’s not literally Harley Quinn. The movie is supposedly a musical, so Phillips could just put the two of them in front of a camera for two hours and he’d end up with something interesting at least, but apparently he’s not doing that.
What he is doing is hiring esteemed Irish actor Brendan Gleeson, with Deadline saying it is “unknown” who the In Bruges, Paddington 2, and Mr. Mercedes star will be playing, but we have a pitch: Joker’s… dad? Alright, it’s not much of a pitch, and the real answer is probably that he’ll be some doctor at Arkham Asylum, but wouldn’t it be fun if he were playing the Joker version of Two-Face or the Penguin or Mr. Freeze? Or, much like how Arthur Fleck is A Joker but not necessarily THE Joker, Gleeson could be playing A Two-Face or A Penguin or A Mr. Freeze.
The Deadline story also has an interesting detail about Folie À Deux that hasn’t been as well-publicized as the fact that it might be a musical, saying that the movie will “be set in Arkham Asylum.” A movie entirely set within the walls of Gotham’s preeminent prison for clowns and Mr. Freezes would be a clever setup for the Joker sequel, and it would get Phillips a little further away from the city and the Batman (or at least A Batman, since the real deal was just a kid in the first movie).
Joker: Folie À Deux is still a ways off, with Warner Bros. setting it for October of 2024, so it’ll be years before we really get to see any of this. We don’t know about you, but we’ll pass the time by picturing Brendan Gleeson as various Batman villains. Man-Bat? Sure. The Scarecrow? Yeah, do it. Poison Ivy? No bad ideas, we like it.