It looks like Joaquin Phoenix is going to get a Golden Globe winner to play his mom.
Sources tell The Wrap that Frances Conroy is in talks to play Penny, the mother to Phoenix’s Joker in Todd Phillips’ Joker. This is how that leaked casting sheet from last month described Penny:
Lower class, very attractive in her younger days, still feels that way about herself. But recently her health has started failing, and she’s nearly bedridden in her Lower East Side apartment which she shares with her grown son who just moved back home. She’s obsessed with her former employer and can’t believe that this is what her life has come to, that she has ended up here, like this…
The character was rumored to be the Joker’s mother when the leak came out, and her death in the film is part of what sends the Joker over the edge.
Conroy won her Golden Globe Award in 2004 for her breakthrough role as Ruth Fisher on the HBO Series Six Feet Under. She has also been nominated for six Emmy Awards, four for that series and two for two different roles in two different seasons of American Horror Story.
If cast, this will actually be the second comic book film she has acted in, albeit probably the only one she’d want to admit to. She played Ophelia, the new age mystic who teaches Halle Berry about her powers and legacy in 2004’s abysmal Catwoman. She has also provided the voice of Ma Kent in a number of animated, direct to DVD Superman films.
