Joker Movie Script Confirms Sophie’s Fate With Cut Scenes

Scenes included in the Joker script but cut from the finished film reveal the fate of Sophie (Zazie Beetz), the single mother and next door neighbor who catches the eye of a downtrodden Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix). In Joker, Arthur has a “bad day” after discovering a distressing truth about his mother, Penny (Frances Conroy), learning she’s his adoptive mother and that she allowed an abusive boyfriend to inflict irreparable harm on Arthur as a boy. Entering Sophie’s apartment in the middle of a breakdown, it’s realized their growing romantic relationship was all in the delusional Arthur’s head.

In the film, the fate of Sophie is left ambiguou when she tells Arthur to leave her home: he’s seen leaving, apparently without incident, and Sophie isn’t seen again. Later, Arthur visits a bedridden Penny at the hospital, where he smothers her with a pillow. The script penned by director Todd Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver, officially released online in full, confirms Sophie went unharmed after her final encounter with Arthur:

From the kitchen in Penny’s apartment, Arthur scribbles a misspelled note: “…on Murray Franklin Tonight — Pleese Watch!” Arthur stuffs the note inside an envelope addressed to “Sofi.” In the hallway, we follow Arthur “heading for Sophie’s apartment, his dyed green hair now slicked back.”

“STILL FROM BEHIND, he lays the envelope in front of Sophie’s door, then pulls something else out of his pocket — his body obscuring what it is — puts it down by her door and leaves,” the script reads. “As he walks away down the hallway, we see what else Arthur left behind — HIS MAGIC WAND OF FLOWERS, at Sophie’s door.”

Later, when the clown-faced Arthur appears as a guest on the late night talk show hosted by Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), the script includes a scene of a horrified Sophie waking up her young daughter when she witnesses the Joker shoot and kill Franklin on live television:

“Sophie screams and jumps to her feet horrified! Waking up GiGi who starts to cry when she sees what’s on television–ANGLE ON TELEVISION, Joker gets up and walks right up to the camera. Blood sprayed over his white painted face. Hear the studio audience still screaming, bedlam all around him.”

Phillips earlier addressed Sophie’s fate with IndieWire, noting Arthur only killed those who wronged him in some way.

“He doesn’t kill her, definitively,” Phillips said. “As the filmmaker and the writer I am saying he doesn’t kill her. We like the idea that it’s almost like a litmus test for the audience to say, ‘How crazy is he?’ Most people that I’ve spoken to think he didn’t kill her because they understand the idea that he only kills people that did him wrong. She had nothing to do with it. Most people understood that, even as a villain, he was living by a certain code. Of course he didn’t kill this woman down the hall.”

Joker is available to own on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray Jan. 7.