Joaquin Phoenix hasn’t been seen onscreen since winning the Academy Award for Best Actor thanks to his haunting portrayal of Arthur Fleck in Joker, which smashed all sorts of box office records to become the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever made.
In the aftermath of such critical and commercial success, you can guarantee he’s been fielding offers from all over Hollywood, but Phoenix has always been someone driven solely by the strength of script and character rather than money and accolades. The 46 year-old is currently shooting Disappointment Blvd., the hotly-anticipated next feature from Hereditary and Midsommar‘s Ari Aster, in which he plays a successful entrepreneur.
The first image of Phoenix on set has now been revealed, and it looks to be another transformative performance by one of the finest talents in the business, which you can check out below.
Aster is only 35 years old with just two films under his belt, but he’s already viewed as one of the most distinctive filmmaking voices of his generation, and with good reason. Hereditary and Midsommar were unique, engaging and acclaimed explorations of psychological horror, although Disappointment Blvd. could mark a change of pace.
All we know so far about the project is that it’s been described as “an intimate, decades-spanning portrait of one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time,” so there’s not even an indication as to which genre it could occupy, but we know better than to rule anything out when Aster is involved. Based on the strength of his previous work and the caliber of the leading man’s filmography, Disappointment Blvd. is shaping up to be one of cinema’s most intriguing mysteries as filming continues.