Jared Leto to Return as The Joker in Zack Snyder’s Director’s Cut of ‘Justice League’—WATCH

Jared Leto’s interpretation of the Joker, widely derided in the first Suicide Squad movie and incomparably contrasted by Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker from last year’s hit, will get the last laugh.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Zack Snyder’s new Justice League cut is getting some killer laughs. Jared Leto, who played classic DC villain the Joker in 2016’s Suicide Squad, has joined in the shooting of additional footage for the “Snyder Cut,” the filmmaker’s definitive version of the 2017 superhero movie he was forced to exit and never saw through completion, multiple sources tell The Hollywood Reporter.”

The project, officially titled Zack Snyder’s Justice League, is being overseen by HBO Max, which is financing the new round of shooting and the completion of the many unfinished scenes, and will air as a four-episode event series next year.

Shooting is currently underway with Ben Affleck, Ray Fisher and Amber Heard among those involved, on top of Leto. It is unclear which other actors are included.

In the meantime, check out Medium‘s defense of Leto’s portrayal in the wake of Phoenix’s, “Leto’s Joker is a epitomises this version of the character, which evolved out of DC’s ‘Dark Age’: the 1980s. With Morrison, Moore, and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Joker became a flamboyant aesthete with an insatiable appetite for self-reinvention. This was inspired by David Bowie’s chameleonic showmanship (particularly his ‘Thin White Duke’ persona, which Joker incorporated into his Grant Morrison Batman personality ‘The Thin White Duke of Death’). Morrison had planned Arkham Asylum’s Joker to be a transvestite, wearing black leather and lingerie in mimicry of Madonna’s music videos; DC’s editors, however, prevented this, fearing Jack Nicholson’s tough-talking image would be conflated with Morrison’s sexually dimorphic version when Nicholson was to play Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman that same year.”

It continues, “Joker retained some sexualised and androgynous aesthetics, wearing lipstick and heels in Dark Knight Returns, and Prince’s ’89 Batman song ‘Batdance’ containing allusions to sexuality and sadomasochism. This culminated in Joker, as Morrison described in his semi-autobiographical book Supergods, possessing a ‘camp and decadent Weimar-era’ degeneracy congruent throughout DC’s 80s graphic novels.”