The People’s Joker director wanted a trans villain on screen in an era of trans vilification

03.04.2024 - 16:23 / polygon.com / Harley Quinn / Todd Phillips

If Warner Bros. Pictures had successfully intimidated trans filmmaker Vera Drew out of releasing her tiny pop-punk biopic The People’s Joker, it’s possible that it would have disappeared quietly: yet another small, personal indie film hunting for an audience in an oversaturated market. Instead, Vera’s hallucinogenic memoir — an energetic, rawly personal trans coming-out story built around crowdsourced digital animation — became international news.

The People’s Joker premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022, but a sharply worded letter from Warner Bros. about copyright concerns led Vera and the TIFF organizers to cancel further screenings and take it off the market. Vera retreated to refine the film, while looking for a simpatico distributor that wouldn’t bury it with a straight-to-streaming release. It’s screened at a handful of regional festivals since then, but it’s largely been unavailable to the public.

That’s left The People’s Joker as an intriguing mystery for some would-be viewers, and a topic of queasy worry for others. The movie explores trans identity as a parallel to Todd Phillips’ villain origin story Joker, among many other Batman-adjacent movies. Vera filters her life through familiar fiction, subverting and channeling popular characters to show how she navigated abuse, poisonous relationships, finding an identity through stand-up comedy, and the search for a happy ending.

With so many people theorizing about the movie before they have any way of seeing it, that framing has raised some concerns. With the lives and rights of trans people being turned into a political battleground nationwide, and an increasing number of lawmakers openly vilifying trans people, the argument goes, is this really the time for a movie associating a trans woman with a character famous for being a mentally ill mass murderer?

Vera’s movie uses that metaphor in a richly layered way, drawing on the Joker — and equally on his sidekick turned independent antihero, Harley Quinn — as a kind of extreme jester who laughs at and upends societally accepted norms. In a wide-ranging interview with Polygon, ahead of The People’s Joker’s theatrical release on April 5, Vera said she understands any concern people have about the movie — but she hopes that once people see it, they’ll understand why it is, as she puts it, “one of the most joyfully queer films ever made.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Polygon: There’s a lot of complicated symbolism in this movie, around Batman and his rogues’ gallery. But maybe the most complicated piece of symbolic language is the way the version of you we see in the movie is both Joker and Harley Quinn — her stand-up comedy stage name is literally