Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty, Everett
Though director Todd Phillips has denied it, Joker: Folie à Deux seems a clear response to the unexpected success of the original Joker. It’s sort of a romance, and sort of a musical, but mostly the sequel is a courtroom drama devoted to literally relitigating the first film in exhausting detail. To hammer the point home, the film includes an in-universe analogue to the 2019 Joker: an unauthorized TV movie about the crimes of Arthur Fleck that everybody has seen and almost nobody likes. The only characters who praise it are creeps, almost as if Phillips is trying to tell us something about his audience …
Folie à Deux never shows us this TV movie, perhaps because that would be funny and interesting, two qualities the film abhors. But it got me thinking: If there was an in-universe TV movie about Joker, who would star in it? So, with the help of my illustrious colleagues Josef Adalian and Christopher Bonanos, I fan-cast the early-’80s TV version of Joker that the residents of Gotham City might have watched on a Sunday night in November. Check your local listings.
Tommy Lee Jones as Arthur Fleck
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty, Warner Brothers
I had originally considered Richard Chamberlain, king of early-’80s TV, as our leading man. However, Joe convinced me that Chamberlain was a smidge too classy to star in the Joker TV movie, which everyone in Folie à Deux agrees is terrible. A more plausible pick might be Tommy Lee Jones, who by the early ’80s had established himself as a compelling No. 2 in films like Rolling Thunder and Coal Miner’s Daughter but had to go to TV if he wanted top billing. As shown by his Emmy-winning turn as Gary Gilmore in 1983’s The Executioner’s Song, Jones was not above playing real-life murderers, and he had the right combination of star power and darkness to convincingly inhabit Arthur Fleck. Twelve years and one Oscar later, the IRL version of Jones would play another iconic Batman villain, with mixed results.
Jean Simmons as Penny Fleck
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty, Warner Brothers
The ’80s TV-movie sphere was a refuge for veteran actors who’d been stars in the ’40s and ’50s. Take Jean Simmons — the original one — who’d burst onto the scene as an ingenue in the postwar era, starring in classics like Guys and Dolls and Spartacus. By the 1980s, she’d transitioned to playing mothers in miniseries such as The Thorn Birds and North and South. Simmons could pull off the wounded dignity that Frances Conroy brought to her part in Joker, with an edge, too: As her Oscar-nominated turn in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet proved, she did madness well.
Jerry Lewis as Murray Franklin
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty, Warner Brothers
Since Robert De Niro is a cast member in Joker, we can assume the actor Robert De Niro does not exist in the world of the movie. Similarly, while it’s technically possible Martin Scorsese still exists in the Joker universe, without his iconic leading man Scorsese’s filmography would have undoubtedly turned out different. (Otherwise somebody probably would have mentioned how Arthur Fleck kind of had a Travis Bickle thing going on.) Thus we infer that in the universe of Joker there is also no King of Comedy. Which means that, when Jerry Lewis wants to make an onscreen comeback playing a dickish talk-show host, he cannot star opposite a two-time Oscar winner in a movie that plays in competition at Cannes but must instead make do with a ripped-from-the-headlines TV movie.
Debbie Allen as Sophie Dumond
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty, Warner Brothers
We can be sure that the TV movie depicts Arthur’s troubled relationship with his neighbor, as Zazie Beetz’s character pops up briefly in Folie à Deux to reveal that the telefilm made her life miserable. Debbie Allen was as buzzy in the early ’80s as Beetz was in the late 2010s, having just received a Tony nomination for playing Anita in the West Side Story revival. (Speaking of Jerry Lewis, here’s Allen doing “America” at Lewis’s annual muscular-dystrophy telethon.) At this point in her career, the multi-hyphenate was best known as a dancer, and she would soon embark on a six-season stint as the dance teacher in the Fame TV show. But Allen had a sideline in harder-edged TV movies, too, as when she played a female prison guard in 1983’s Women of San Quentin.
John Forsythe as Thomas Wayne
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Forsythe was television’s go-to rich guy of the ’70s and ’80s, playing the voice of Charlie in Charlie’s Angels and Blake Carrington in Dynasty. (Like Allen, Forsythe was also a guest star on The Love Boat, where he romanced Ursula Andress.) Knowing the politics of the 1980s, I’m guessing this fantastically wealthy mayoral candidate came off slightly better on TV than he did in Joker.
Ben Affleck as Bruce Wayne
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty, Warner Brothers
Would the TV-movie version of Joker devote quite so much screen time to the character of Bruce Wayne if no one in-universe was aware he would grow up to be Batman? I can imagine some producer wanting to nix the kid — but maybe the casting director found just the right 10-year-old, a young lad from Boston who’d just appeared in a kitchen-sink drama and would soon be cast in the PBS science series The Voyage of the Mimi. And perhaps there was just something about this young actor that felt like he was being called to this particular role. Almost as if it was his destiny? When faced with such budding talent, I suppose the producer would have to relent, and this TV movie would indeed feature a scene with Bruce Wayne, plot relevance be damned. This kid’s a star!
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