Todd Phillips Shares JOKER Deleted Scene That Reveals the Fate of Zazie Beetz's Character

There was a lot of speculating at the end of Todd Phillips’s film Joker about what was real and what was not. The movie was told from the perspective of the main character, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and while we were given glimpses throughout that led us to understand that he was having delusions throughout the story, many things were left uncertain. One part of the film that came as a surprise was when we found out that the woman down the hall whom he had been having a bit of a relationship with didn’t actually know him at all. Everything we had seen between them had been a hallucination, and once we made the realization, the scene cut to Arthur (Phoenix) leaving and walking down the hall.

Arthur had already killed a handful of people at this point, and went on to kill more, so some fans wondered if he had killed the woman, played by Zazie Beetz. In an interview with IndieWire, Phillips confirmed that she definitely didn’t die, and there was even a small bit of a later scene that ended up being cut, that would have confirmed it.

He explained that in the shot, the audience would have seen Beetz’s character watching the TV and seeing Arthur’s unraveling performance on the late night show. Phillips said:

“He doesn’t kill her, definitively. As the filmmaker and the writer I am saying he doesn’t kill her. We like the idea that it’s almost like a litmus test for the audience to say, ‘how crazy is he?’ Most people that I’ve spoken to think he didn’t kill her because they understand the idea that he only kills people that did him wrong. She had nothing to do with it. Most people understood that, even as a villain, he was living by a certain code. Of course he didn’t kill this woman down the hall.”

That’s good to know, that at least she, her child, and the nice guy he worked with all got out alive. It doesn’t make me like the movie any more, but it’s still good to know.

Did you like Joker?