Vanity Fair– What becomes of a prophet of mayhem in a world that has already fallen apart?
Maybe he just lurks among the other nightmares in their blighted landscape. Maybe he has indulged all of his most bloodthirsty impulses to the point of boredom. Maybe he hunts down those striving for order until he finds someone still capable of being hurt.
This is the Joker as he appears in Zack Snyder’s new Justice League, an entirely new element the filmmaker decided to add as he completed his original vision of the the DC Comics team-up.
Jared Leto’s clown prince was not part of Snyder’s original plan before walking away from the movie in 2017 amid a clash with Warner Bros. leadership and grief over a family tragedy, but when HBO Max offered him the chance to finalize his own cut of the movie, the director had a few things he wanted to add to the long-awaited #Snydercut. Batman’s nemesis was one of them. “The Joker is really the only thing that I thought of in retrospect,” Snyder tells Vanity Fair. “But I will say that it was always my intention to bring Joker into that world.”
When he first began working on DC films a decade ago, Snyder thought he would eventually bring the villain into conflict with Batman in a later project, but after his falling out with the studio, he realized that probably would never happen. Instead, when given the opportunity to finally finish Justice League his way for HBO Max, he asked for additional photography to fit Joker into the four-hour event, debuting March 18th.
Our first full look at Jared Leto as Joker in #ZackSnydersJusticeLeague pic.twitter.com/fqXpVBcl1E
— Rotten Tomatoes (@RottenTomatoes) February 9, 2021