Watch an interview with Heath Ledger, discussing what brought him to the role of The Joker in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight.
Watch a clip of Ledger as The Joker.
Watch the trailer for The Dark Knight.
Watch the original Dark Knight teaser, which relied heavily on Ledger's voice.
Heath Ledger's performance as the sociopathic mass-murdering clown called The Joker in The Dark Knight is a masterful final performance (full final performance, that is - we've yet to see what will become of his unfinished work in Terry Giliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus). Ledger completely vanished into this disturbing, unnerving and frightening character, putting the Joker on par with Anthony Hopkins' Oscar-winning portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs in terms of sheer presence, intimidation and influence.
Ledger didn't get to speak as much as we'd have like to hear about his role as The Joker, and the world is full of questions to ask him now that we're getting to see what an absolutely amazing tour-de-force it was. But he did leave us with some perspective on his work, such as this interview where he gave us the following tidbits on his process.
“It’s the most fun I’ve had with a character and probably will ever have. It was an exhausting process. At the end of the day I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk. I was absolutely wrecked.”
"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.”
When you finally get to see what Ledger does in The Dark Knight, you'll be incensed all over again that a talent this astounding was taken from us so quickly.
