There are few tragedies in the film industry quite like the untimely death of Heath Ledger. After coming through in the late 1990s and early 2000s with films like 10 Things I Hate About You, The Patriot and A Knight’s Tale, Ledger quickly established himself as one of the greatest Australian actors of all time.
His performance in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain saw Ledger become the eight-youngest actor to be nominated for a ‘Best Actor’ Academy Award, but his greatest work surely came in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, in which Ledger played the iconic villain the Joker. It remains one of the best-ever superhero movie performances and saw Ledger win a posthumous Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ following his death in 2008.
“It was the most fun I’ve had with a character, hands down,” he once said of playing the Joker. “And I would have actually played the Joker for nothing. If the budget for The Dark Knight was $100,000, truly, this character was too good to turn down.” There’s some real sadness in these words, considering the Joker was to be one of the last characters Ledger would ever portray.
Ledger had already been afforded the chance to see the vision of Gotham City Nolan had in mind via his first Batman film. “I’d already seen this world he’d created in Batman Begins, so there wasn’t room for the old interpretation,” Ledger said. “There was, in fact, an opportunity for a new version of the Joker. I sat down in front of Chris and gave him my ideas, and they were identical to his ideas.”
Nolan offered those very ideas and said, “I had an idea of what the Joker would be in the world that we created in Batman Begins. To me, it was creating a sort of psychologically credible anarchist. A force of anarchy, a force of chaos, a purposeless criminal. A psychopath. To me, that was the most frightening form of evil. The enemy who’s not out for anything.”
The lengths that Ledger went to in order to prepare for playing the Joker were rather extraordinary, and he wanted to create a feeling of isolation and loneliness. “I locked myself away in a room for sixth months and kind of came up with this creep,” the actor said. “Walking around like a madman, finding posture, finding stance.”
The most important for Ledger playing the Joker, though, was the find the character’s voice. “Finding his voice is very important because when you find the voice, you find the breath within the voice,” he said. And it’s easy to see that Ledger did indeed find the perfect voice for the iconic villain, creating one of the most nuanced superhero movie characters of all time.
