”I know there are these rumors out there that playing the Joker drove him to his grave, but I never saw anything of that. [Heath Ledger] was always on time. He knew his part backwards and forwards. I just thought he was a really sweet kid,” Gary Oldman said dismissing the mental toll of the character in this week’s Entertainment Weekly engaging cover story on “The Dark Knight“ and Heath Ledger’s tour de force reinvention of the classic Batman villain.
“The idea of anarchy as an absolute. The idea of chaos as the most frightening thing to society. The idea of a motiveless criminal, somebody who just wants to watch the world burn,” said director Christopher Nolan of Ledger’s darker approach to the character than say Jack Nicholson’s almost gentlemanly performance, by comparison. Appropriately enough, Oldman says that one of Ledger’s anarchy-inspiring characters was Alex (Malcolm McDowell) from “Clockwork Orange.”
”The guy had serious nuts,” Nolan said. ”Such a lack of vanity. This was an actor who wasn’t afraid to bury himself in his character — to a massive extent.”
Though he did immerse himself in the role, everyone in the piece waves off the idea that playing the Joker drove him mental or to an early grave. ‘He enjoyed the sort of crazy immersion of acting. He took it incredibly seriously but simultaneously recognized how ridiculous it all is,” Christian Bale said (EW notes that all the cast members was reluctant to talk about Ledger).
The Joker isn’t given an origin in the movie. He just bursts onto the scene like a flame and never dies down, but it’s super-interesting the note the very-plausible back story that Michael Caine invented for his servile Alfred character. ‘Nobody cares but me, but I do it anyway. And my backstory for Alfred was that he was with the Special Infantry Service — sort of like the Navy SEALs — during World War II. But he got injured. So in order to stay in the service, he took a job in the officers’ mess as a barman. And that’s where [Bruce Wayne’s dad] found him. That’s why the accent I use for Alfred is that of an army sergeant. You see, you’re not dealing with an ordinary butler here,” Caine said.
As for all the worries that pundits had in January after Ledger’s passing and how his death would affect the film (reshoots, ADR looping, etc.), Nolan said that was never a problem: he’s a pro. ‘I’ve never done any reshoots on anything,” he says. ”I’ve never had to loop more than a couple of lines in any of my films.”
EW says with all the gushing critical praise and tickets selling out in advance, “The Dark Knight” could be on track to surpass “Spider-Man” and become the highest-grossing comic-book-based movie of all time. Time will certainly tell, it does seem a little too dark for mass consumption as the light and fluffy, first “Spider Man” was. Anyone of any age would have been happy seeing that. ‘Dark Knight? maybe not so much…
