Joaquin Phoenix lost 52 pounds to play “Joker” in the upcoming film after director Todd Phillips said he wanted his character to look “wolf-like and malnourished and hungry.”
“Neither of us put a number on it,” Phillips told TheWrap’s Sharon Waxman in an interview last Friday. “He just started losing weight. When we finally looked at what he lost, it was 52 pounds. He goes hard. That’s my boy, I love him so much.”
“Joker” goes wide on October 4 and is a “deep-dive character study” of the famed Batman villain “in the vein of a Sidney Lumet/Martin Scorsese picture,” according to Phillips.