Joaquin Phoenix Nominated For a Razzie Playing Oscar-Winning Role

In 2020, Joaquin Phoenix won an Academy Award for Best Actor for playing Arthur Fleck in Joker. 

In 2025, Phoenix was nominated for a Razzie for Worst Actor playing the exact same role in Joker’s sequel, Folie à Deux.

This sounds like a joke. But like pretty much everything in Folie à Deux, it is not.

Was Phoenix that much better playing this same character in the first movie? I don’t think so. Whatever you think of Joker: Folie à Deux — and I was certainly not a massive fan — I don’t think Phoenix was the problem. He was fully committed to his role, singing and dancing and generally bringing as much tortured humanity and mental instability as he possibly could to Arthur Fleck.

But the movie around him was often a chore — and it felt at times like it was deliberately composed to put fans of the original movie on trial. Half the film was set in a mental hospital, and half the film was set in a courtroom, as Gotham City’s district attorney tries Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck for his crimes from Joker.

Yet Folie à Deux wasn’t a compelling character study or a gripping legal thriller. But, again, that’s not on Phoenix. He didn’t write the film. (And in fact Lady Gaga was kind of good in Joker: Folie à Deux in spite of its conceptual issues, and she got nominated for a Razzie for Worst Actress anyway, but that’s another matter entirely.)

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While as far as I can tell this exact circumstance — being nominated for a Razzie for reprising a role that previously won an actor their Oscar — is without precedent in the history of the Oscars and the Razzies, it’s almost happened before. One prior actor was nominated for an Oscar and later won a Razzie for reprising the same role.

That’s Sylvester Stallone, who earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for the first Rocky and then years later won the Worst Actor Razzie for playing Rocky Balboa in Rocky IV. (He was also nominated for Worst Actor as Rocky for Rocky V, but that year he “lost” to Andrew Dice Clay from The Adventures of Ford Fairlane.)

What does this all mean? Absolutely nothing! It’s utterly meaningless. But it might just help you win at bar trivia some day, so file this away in the back of your mind somewhere.

Will Joaquin Phoenix win a Razzie for his previously Oscar-winning role? We’ll find out when the 2025 Razzies are announced on March 1.