Joaquin Phoenix reportedly had his car stolen outside of his Los Angeles home.
One of Phoenix’s workers noticed that The Joker star’s Volvo SUV was not parked outside his home on Monday, April 28, according to TMZ. The outlet reported that the worker contacted law enforcement and subsequently filed a police report for a stolen vehicle.
An arrest has not been made and the case is an ongoing investigation for the LAPD.
Phoenix, 50, was reportedly not at his residence at the time of the incident.
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Us Weekly has reached out to Phoenix and the LAPD for comment.
Phoenix has kept a relatively low profile this year following the 2024 of The Joker: Folie à Deux. Phoenix reprised his critically acclaimed role of Arthur Fleck a.k.a The Joker for the film, with Lady Gaga joining the cast as his partner in crime Harley “Lee” Quinzel, better known as Harley Quinn.
“There was a part of me that was reluctant. There was something so special about the first experience and I didn’t want to taint that in any way, but I also loved the idea of a challenge, the idea of continuing the story but finding different tones to play with,” Phoenix said of working on the sequel in a September 2024 interview with Esquire. “And we started talking about music and the idea of performance really around the time of the… I don’t even know if the movie had been released yet or if it had just been released, but we started talking about performance, literally a show, like a live show. There was still a lot more to explore, I thought, with the character. I didn’t want to give it up. And so I was excited, and I was nervous, and everything one could feel, I think.”
In addition to getting into the mind of the Joker for a second time, Phoenix underwent a physical transformation.
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“I’m not going to talk through specifics of the diet, because I just think nobody wants to hear that. But this time, it felt a bit more complicated just because there was so much dance rehearsal that we were doing, which I didn’t have last time,” he recalled during a Venice International Film Festival press conference in September 2024. “So it felt a bit more difficult, but it is safe . . . I’m now 49, I probably shouldn’t do this again.”
While the first Joker film was well-regarded by critics and earned Phoenix his first Oscar win, the sequel sparked backlash due to the movie’s uneven tone and controversial ending, in which Phoenix’s character was killed by another inmate who carves a smile into his own face, strongly implying he is the “true” Joker.
“There’s a warmth in that scene, which is nice,” Phoenix said of the final scene in an October 2024 interview with IGN. “That’s all that I was thinking about that I was after, is here’s this young man who’s telling me a joke and he’s nervous to tell me the joke, I can tell that he’s nervous, and I’m going to hear him out. And it’s a pretty good setup.”
