Joaquin Phoenix says Christopher Nolan had reached out to him to play the Joker in his 2008 film The Dark Knight but the actor "wasn't ready" to play the Batman supervillain then.

Heath Ledger eventually played the Joker opposite Christian Bale as The Dark Knight in the second movie of Nolan's Batman trilogy. Ledger, who died six months before the release of the film, won the best supporting actor Oscar posthumously for his stellar performance.

In 2020, Phoenix bagged a best actor Oscar for playing the titular character in Todd Phillips' film Joker, an origin story of the DC antagonist that went on to become a blockbuster.

"I remember I talked to Chris Nolan about The Dark Knight and that didn't happen for whatever reason. I wasn't ready then. That's one of those things where it's like, ‘What is in me that's not doing this?' And it's not about me. There's something else. There's another person who is going to do something. … I can't imagine what it would be like if we didn't have Heath Ledger's performance in that film, right?" the actor told Rick Rubin on the "Tetragrammaton" podcast.

"I don't know whether Christopher Nolan was coming to me saying, ‘You're definitely the person.' I can't remember the context of how we met, but I know we met. My feeling was I shouldn't do this, but maybe he also was like, ‘He's not the guy'," he added.

Phoenix recently reprised his role of the Joker in Joker: Folie a Deux. The musical psychological thriller is Phillips' follow-up to 2019's Joker and also stars Lady Gaga.