Robert De Niro has addressed these parallels in the past. In Joker, he plays talk show host Murray Franklin, who, in a key sequence in the film, interacts with Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck. While Murray Franklin is not King of Comedy’s mentally deranged wannabe stand-up comedian Rupert Pupkin years later, and Joker is not an unofficial sequel to that film, De Niro admits that it is connected in an obvious way.
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