The Weird Cultural Invisibility of Jared Leto's Joker

Siri, show me an image that’s exhausting just to look at.

I can’t help but be struck by the fact that no actor has ever been nominated for an Academy Award for playing a character based on a comic book with the exception of Heath Ledger and Joaquin for The Dark Knight and Joker respectively, who both won. 

No, Al Pacino in Dick Tracy doesn’t count, since Dick Tracy is a comic strip. Nor does William Hurt in A History of Violence, since that was a graphic novel. 

Ledger and Phoenix didn’t just become the first actors to win Academy Awards for playing comic book super-villains: they became instant icons of toxic masculinity whose tortured images can be found on a million memes and tee-shirts. 

Ledger and Phoenix’s gritty, tormented portrayals of the criminal clown that fights Batman took up prime real estate in the public imagination the same way that Jack Nicholson’s performance in the 1989 smash was absolutely ubiquitous in the aftermath of the zeitgeist capturing success of Tim Burton’s blockbuster. 

How good of a role is the Clown Prince of Crime? In the last thirty-two years no fewer than four Academy Award winners have played him: Jack Nicholson (who won for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Terms of Endearment), Ledger, Phoenix and Jared Leto, who played him in Suicide Squad and Zack Snyder’s Justice League. 

When Leto famously signed on to play Joker in visionary filmmaker David Ayer’s Suicide Squad he was only a few years removed from winning an Academy Award for his abysmal performance in 2013’s Dallas Buyer’s Club. 

The casting of a recent Academy Award winner, part-time rock star and cult leader in the role of Joker was big news, overshadowing the heavyweight casting of Will Smith as Deadshot and Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn. 

The Joker is almost always a big deal. Leto made it an even bigger deal by going method and never breaking character throughout filming. 

Leto is maybe my least favorite actor so you can only imagine how happy it made me and everyone else who thinks Leto is an insufferable cartoon of a self-important “artiste" that not only did his Joker not dominate Suicide Squad the way Nicholson did Batman, Ledger did The Dark Knight and Phoenix did Joker; he was barely in the damn thing. 

Leto came crazily close to getting cut out of Suicide Squad. A role and performance that was hyped to the heavens ended up being one of the biggest disappointments in superhero movie history. 

The thundering anti-climax that was Leto in Suicide Squad stood in sharp contrast to the tidal wave of interest and acclaim that greeted Phoenix’s overwrought and shitty, yet critically acclaimed and Oscar-winning performance in Joker.

It has to kill Leto that while audiences and critics forcefully rejected his Joker, they just as eagerly embraced his partner in crime Harley Quinn, who snagged a much loved cult spin-off of her own in Birds of Prey and will be starring in the eagerly anticipated Suicide Squad movie The Suicide Squad. 

Fans are excited about The Suicide Squad because it’s a James Gunn movie but also because Jared Leto will not be in it. 

Even with his cameo in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Leto’s Joker is perversely, refreshingly invisible. He’s such a non-entity, in fact, that Leto signed on to play goth superhero Morbius in an upcoming blockbuster, confident that nobody would look at him in this new role and see an iconic killer clown Leto might have played but most assuredly did not master or own. 

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