“Menacing, Mercurial, Droll and Diabolic” — Heath Ledger’s Joker
Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning Joker performance in The Dark Knight is considered the hallmark of one of the all-time greats in cinematic history. On IMDB’s Top 250, the movie is ranked #4 behind Shawshank Redemption and the two Godfather movies. Today, we’ll dig into Ledger’s portrayal, and though this fact isn’t likely to be considered “fun” in some ways, I think it’s very interesting nonetheless.
The Casting
In 2005, Christopher Nolan, the film’s director, approached Heath Ledger asking him to play Batman. Ledger declined, saying he’d “never do this type of film” and Nolan went with Christian Bale in Batman Begins. The next year, when Nolan was considering the sequel, he cast a wide net to find the next great Joker, one of the transcendent roles in film that invites scrutiny from fans only rivaled by the selection of the next Bond. Under consideration at the time were well-established A-listers like Robin Williams, Steve Carrell, and Adrien Brody.
Nolan, so impressed with Ledger previously, went with him, much to the derision of “Bat-fans” around the world. Most fans were concerned with Ledger’s “pretty-boy” vibe, and some particularly bigoted ones were done with him forever after his role in Brokeback Mountain. Nolan was unfazed, and somewhat prophetically promised the audience that “watching Heath Ledger’s interpretation of this iconic character taking on Christian Bale’s Batman is going to be incredible.” Damn right.
The Preparation
Ledger was cast for the role even before the script was written, giving him a ton of time to ruminate on the role and what he wanted to make of it. He wanted to put his own spin on it, so instead of studying the iconic previous Jokers, he found a separate source of inspiration — Alex DeLarge, the protagonist and antihero from A Clockwork Orange. The Wikipedia description of DeLarge:
Delarge is a sociopath, who robs, assaults, and terrorizes innocent people for his own amusement. Intellectually, he knows that such behavior is morally wrong, saying that “you can’t have a society with everybody behaving in my manner of the night.” He nevertheless professes to be puzzled by the motivations of those who wish to reform him and others like him, saying that he would never interfere with their desire to be good; he simply “goes to the other shop.”
To get into character, Ledger traveled to London and checked himself into a motel. For the next 43 days, Ledger locked himself in his room (asking for food to be delivered), and put himself into the mind of the Joker he wanted to create. He spent much of the days trying out and perfecting different voices and laughs, which eventually became the pillars of his portrayal. When he finally settled on a voice, he realized he needed to keep his lips moist to maintain it for extended periods. So he used that to give us one of the key Joker tics, as seen below.
Ledger also knew that, while this 43 day stint in the motel could put him squarely into the mind of a psychopath, he would have to be able to get back into this mindset when the movie started filming and he was on set. So in his motel days, he started curating a “diary” (better described as a scrapbook) that he could turn to whenever he needed to snap back into character. The diary reportedly contains “horrific news stories, macabre images, and his various diabolical/psychopathic musings.” There’s a small clip of the diary below, and apparently it’s explained in detail in this documentary.
The Make-Up
The Joker’s makeup is always a central part of the character. John Caglione Jr., a legendary movie makeup artist, was hired for The Dark Knight, and his original vision was a much “cleaner” look, similar to the Jokers of old.
Nolan and Ledger pushed back on this, wanting the character to be more “dirty and realistic” instead of one that “looked like a makeup guy did him up.” Nolan found inspiration from famous Francis Bacon paintings with highly distorted faces.
Ledger loved this idea, and ran with it. His thought was that if the Joker really existed, he would do his own makeup. So Ledger went to a drug store, bought a bunch of supplies, and started perfecting his self-made-up look. He nailed it, and then showed the film’s makeup team how he did it for them to replicate for the rest of the filming.
On Set
Though Ledger took his character immersion extremely seriously, he did try to be a team player on set. Every day, even if there were no Joker scenes to be filmed that day, Ledger would come to set in full make-up and costume. But on his off days, he would be out of character and skateboard around set, giving out bear hugs, cheering people up, and cracking jokes.
Whenever he was on though, he was really on. He’d retreat to his trailer, bring out his diary, and get fully in the mindset of the Joker. Because this character zone he got into was so different from his normal playfulness, none of the other actors were acquainted with the truly terrifying nature of his portrayal. The first scene they filmed all together was the scene where he crashes the Wayne party like the rest of Five Guys invading a Markham bender.
Notice the part of the scene that starts at 1:15 when Rachel emerges. Throughout their interaction, you can see Rachel looking to the ground, to which the Joker pulls her in and starts whispers “Look at me.”
This part of the scene wasn’t scripted at all. Maggie Gyllenhaal, the actor for Rachel, had met Heath Ledger before, but this was her first introduction to his absurd character. After filming, Gyllenhaal admitted she was legitimately terrified by the Joker and kept trying to look away because she was so scared/uncomfortable. Because of this, Ledger totally improvised the “Look at me” line. In that same scene, Michael Caine, who played Alfred, was supposed to have a few lines as well. Instead, he was so shaken by Ledger that he totally forgot what he was supposed to say. Caine’s take:
I’d never seen any of (his Joker work) and the elevator door opened and him and his cronies came out and I forgot every bloody line. They frightened the bloody life out of me.
In the famous scene where Batman and the Joker are in the interogation room, and Batman is trying to beat an answer out of the Joker as to where Rachel is. Before this scene, Ledger asked Bale to actually hit him as hard as he could during the scene as he wanted to channel the sadistic, maniacal nature of how he thought the Joker would revel in that scene.
There are also two scenes in the movie where the Joker sends in videos to the news station of him torturing “Batman” (it’s actually a fake Batman).
Ledger approached Nolan and asked if Ledger could direct these hand-filmed scenes, to make it as realistic as possible. Nolan loved the idea and let Ledger run with both.
Finally, Ledger also improvised one of the most classic Joker moments. In the scene where the Joker is in the holding cell and the mayor comes in to the station to promote Jim Gordon to commissioner, the Joker starting mockingly clapping. This was not scripted at all, but fits perfectly what the Joker would have done in that situation. It also gave us this priceless gif:
Aftermath
As we all know, Ledger’s career was cut tragically short a few months after filming when he passed away from an accidental overdose. At the time of his death, many media outlets took a sensationalist view on his passing and tied it directly to his time as the Joker and the psychological damage it must have inflicted. This was fueled by an MTV interview with Jack Nicholson, a previous Joker, who, when told of Ledger’s death mid-interview, took a long pause and responded ominously “I warned him.”
In the time since, this stance has softened substantially, and most people now view his death as a pure accident. The biggest proponent of this is the director of the film Ledger was working at the time of his death, a man named Terry Gilliam. He thoroughly rejects the notion that the Joker role is what killed Ledger. He told The Talk in 2012:
Heath was so solid. His feet were on the ground and he was the least neurotic person I’ve ever met. Heath was just great and that’s why it became so impossible to understand. But for the outside world they had to sort of invent a reason. He was incredibly intelligent, generous, sweet, wise, solid as a rock, and unbelievably playful. So when he acted it was like playing, but wherever that playing went he followed it fearlessly. But then I would say ‘cut’ and we’d be talking about football. So there was none of this twisted neurosis that a lot of actors suffer from.
There were a few things about the Joker that still do tell a cautionary tale for what immersing yourself in a troubled character’s mindset can do to you. During filming, Ledger told the New York Times that he was only sleeping about two hours a night. He said, “I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.” He became so restless that he eventually turned to a pretty liberal use of Ambien, which some people fear played a role in his later drug habits. Also, the chilling final page of Ledger’s Joker diary had large text scribbled over his notes that read “BYE BYE.”
All in all, the role of the Joker in the Dark Knight will be forever memorable to all of us — a sharp and unnerving performance that took us right to the edge of what’s possible in acting, and maybe just a little bit beyond. As the New Yorker described it in 2008, it was a “heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss.”
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