Gone are the face tattoos and slicked-back emerald undercut hairstyle of that movie, replaced by a visage that looks like a creature who crawled out of the basement of a long-abandoned insane asylum. Maybe he did.
Leto is wearing a hospital gown and surgical mask in the photos Snyder released exclusively to Vanity Fair, which the director says is probably a remnant of his escape into the wild when the world fell. In some of his Justice League scenes, Leto’s Joker also sports a bulletproof vest festooned with grimy law enforcement badges. “He has tons of badges,” Snyder said. “Those are his trophies.”
(Spoiler warning) Joker appears in the new film during a sequence set on a ruined Earth after the alien tyrant Darkseid invades and decimates the planet. It’s a dream sequence, a psychic vision, experienced by Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne that reveals what will happen if the superheroes fail to stop the onslaught. Joker is sort of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, supplying motivation through terror.
“The cool thing about the scene is that it’s Joker talking directly to Batman about Batman,” Snyder said. “It’s Joker analyzing Batman about who he is and what he is. That’s the thing I also felt like fans deserved from the DC Universe. That is to say, the Jared Leto Joker and the Ben Affleck Batman, they never really got together. It seemed uncool to me that we would make it all the way through this incarnation of Batman and Joker without seeing them come together.”