Why Joaquin Phoenix Shaved Half His Head

Actor Joaquin Phoenix made waves on social media this week after he debuted a bizarre new look. On Tuesday, the 46-year-old Joker star stepped out at the New York Film Festival with the middle of his head buzzed short, and it turns out the new 'do is all for a good reason. Although the actor debuted the hairstyle while attending a Q&A for his upcoming movie C'mon C'mon, his buzzed-about new hairstyle is actually for a role in another upcoming film of his, Disappointment Blvd.

Although details about the film are few and far between, PEOPLE in July obtained photos of Phoenix on set in Montreal, Canada showing the actor looking almost unrecognizable as he sported gray, balding hair. You can view the photos, which show the actor walking the set in a white shirt and khaki pants, by clicking here. It appears that in the months since those photos were snapped, Phoenix has allowed his hair to grow out at different lengths, resulting in the style he sported during the Tuesday night New York Film Festival event.

In addition to the actor, IMDb notes Disappointment Blvd. also stars Michael Gandolfini, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Parker Posey, and Zoe Lister-Jones, among others, though details about their respective roles are unknown, including character names. Directed by Ari Aster, the comedy horror film's plot is described as "an intimate, decades-spanning portrait of one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time."

Of course, any fan of Phoenix will know that the great lengths he has gone to to get into character for Disappointment Blvd. are not out of the ordinary. When Phoenix landed the lead role of Arthur Fleck in 2019's box office hit Joker, he underwent a major transformation that saw him lose 52 pounds. While promoting the film at the Venice International Film Festival, Phoenix opened up about the impact of that drastic weight loss, telling reporters, "the first thing was the weight loss, that's really what I started with. As it turns out, that impacts your psychology, and you really start to go mad when you lose that much weight in that amount of time."

Phoenix later told the Associated Press, "the interesting thing for me is what I had expected and anticipated with the weight loss was these feelings of dissatisfaction, hunger, a certain kind of vulnerability and a weakness. But what I didn't anticipate was this feeling of kind of fluidity that I felt physically. I felt like I could move my body in ways that I hadn't been able to before." Although Joker made over $1 billion at the international box office in 2019, Phoenix recently revealed there are no current plans for Joker 2.