First Man and Bad Times at the El Royale star Shea Whigham has revealed he plays a Gotham City beat cop in the 1981-set Joker origin movie.
“I’ll say this, Bill Camp, from The Night Of, is one of our great actors. He’s finally getting his due. He and I play two cops from Gotham P.D., in 1981 when the city was tough,” Whigham told Collider.
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“We’re investigating something that’s just happened, at the start of the piece. We’re trying to get to the bottom of it, and it leads to where it leads to. You know, it’s rare that I’ve been on a set where it feels like it crackles. It’s pretty amazing . . .I want to have an experience. I don’t call it a job. I don’t say that I have a job. I have a gig, or a piece, or a film, or a show, but it’s never a job . . . We’re having an experience on Joker.”
Whigham praised leading man Joaquin Phoenix, who plays the titular crazed clown, and director Todd Phillips for crafting an “incredible” origin story for the famed Batman foe.
“We’re in the middle of it, right now. It’s intense,” he said.
“For me, it’s as good as it gets. I’m flowing back and forth between television and film, and it’s not lost on me, to work with Joaquin and to see what he’s doing. And Todd Phillips has put this amazing script together. It’s the origin story. People haven’t seen how the Joker becomes the Joker, and oh, my God, man, it’s incredible. It really is.”
Joining Phoenix and Whigham are Zazie Beetz (Deadpool 2) as down-on-her-luck single mother Sophie Dumond, Brett Cullen (The Dark Knight Rises) as Thomas Wayne, and Frances Conroy (American Horror Story), Marc Maron (GLOW) and Robert De Niro (The Irishman) in unknown roles.
“I think, underneath the excitement of these films, and the size of them, there are these incredible characters that are dealing with real-life struggles,” Phoenix previously told Collider when characterizing his entry in the comic book movie genre.
“And sometimes that is uncovered and exposed, and sometimes it isn’t, and so I always felt, like, there were characters in comics that were really interesting and deserve the opportunity to be kind of studied. And so I think that’s what Todd sees appealing about this idea.”
Joker opens October 4, 2019.
