Heath Ledger's Joker is No Joke!
Heath Ledger talks about his role as the Joker in the upcoming The Dark Knight.
Ledger said that his Joker is intended to scare the audience and cited Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) as an early influence on his performance. Ledger told MTV, “(The Joker) has zero empathy.”
In preparation for the role made famous by Academy Award-winner Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, Ledger told IESB:
“…for the Joker I locked myself away in a hotel room for six weeks. I just formulated a voice and a posture and found a real psychology behind the Joker. I really put a lot of work into it. And the experience also on a production scale, by the way, is obviously a completely different shoot. Batman is just such a machine. It's huge and I've never worked on anything that big.”
Does Ledger worry about comparisons to Nicholson? He told IESB:
“I was a big fan of Jack Nicholson - still am - his portrayal of the Joker was perfect for Tim Burton's world and if Tim Burton had come to me and he was doing the sequel and he asked me to play the Joker in his movie, I wouldn't do it. I couldn't. Because you couldn't touch what Jack Nicholson did.”
Batman: The Dark Knight is still in production, slated for a July 2008 release.
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