Vera Drew Was So Inspired by Todd Phillips’ ‘Joker’ That She Made an Unauthorized Parody Film About Her Trans Journey: ‘My Community Is Completely Villainized’
04.04.2024 - 17:25
/ variety.com
William Earl administrator Although her tastes largely align with subversive voices like Eric André and Sacha Baron Cohen, Todd Phillips’ 2019 box office hit “Joker” captivated alt-comedian Vera Drew. “Warner Bros. made a Batman movie about class struggle, the mental health crisis, the fact that our city structures and government systems are completely failing,” she said.
Although she notes that some audiences could have seen the moral of the story as “white men, disenfranchised men are being put down,” she took away different ideas. “I related to it as a trans woman,” she said. “My family system failed me.
My government is still failing me constantly, and for some reason, I still have to pay them taxes next month. I related to that core element of just wanting to make art and put myself out there. How can I do that in a system that is so rigidly gatekept and so much of it is just an arm of propaganda?” Drew took that motivation and made a wholly original and subversive feature with “The People’s Joker,” which opens in theaters Friday.
She stars as Joker the Harlequin, a young trans woman who flees a small town to try to make it in the comedy world. The film is filled with characters parodying Batman mainstays — The Penguin, Ra’s al Ghul, The Riddler, Mr. Freeze and many more — adding a superhero dimension to this coming-of-age story.
In Hollywood, Drew cut her teeth working on productions from alt-comedy idols like André, Nathan Fielder, Tim Robinson, Scott Aukerman, Sacha Baron Cohen and Tim and Eric — largely editing projects that necessitated specific timing to make the offbeat humor hit perfectly. Yet helping these comedians perfect their voices only pushed Drew to further sharpen her own. “Whenever I did stand-up,
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