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.
The only real rule about depicting Joker onscreen is that you have to put your own twist on the monster. Variation is not just allowed, but expected. In this case, Snyder chose to cast his Joker as Leto, who played the part (in an entirely different form) in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad in 2016.
Gone are the face tattoos and slicked-back emerald undercut hairstyle of that movie, replaced by a visage that looks like a creature who crawled out of the basement of a long-abandoned insane asylum. Maybe he did.
Leto is wearing a hospital gown and surgical mask in the photos Snyder released exclusively to Vanity Fair, which the director says is probably a remnant of his escape into the wild when the world fell. In some of his Justice League scenes, Leto’s Joker also sports a bulletproof vest festooned with grimy law enforcement badges. “He has tons of badges,” Snyder said. “Those are his trophies.”
(Spoiler warning) Joker appears in the new film during a sequence set on a ruined Earth after the alien tyrant Darkseid invades and decimates the planet. It’s a dream sequence, a psychic vision, experienced by Ben Affleck‘s Bruce Wayne that reveals what will happen if the superheroes fail to stop the onslaught. Joker is sort of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, supplying motivation through terror.
“The cool thing about the scene is that it’s Joker talking directly to Batman about Batman,” Snyder said. “It’s Joker analyzing Batman about who he is and what he is. That’s the thing I also felt like fans deserved from the DC Universe. That is to say, the Jared Leto Joker and the Ben Affleck Batman, they never really got together. It seemed uncool to me that we would make it all the way through this incarnation of Batman and Joker without seeing them come together.”
Snyder already had a history devised in his head. “The scene explains why Bruce had the Joker card taped to his gun that you see in Batman v Superman,” the director says of his 2016 film, which also hinted that that Joker murdered the Caped Crusader’s sidekick by showing the absent Robin’s armor, spray-painted with “Ha Ha, Joke’s On You, Batman.”