When it comes to The Dark Knight, it’s all about Heath Ledger as the Joker. With his performance as a murderous terror clown, Ledger created a monument for himself. Two sources of inspiration helped him in particular.
The superhero hype of the past decade may be waning, but one film in particular will live on forever from this era: The Batman Movie”The Dark Knight is considered a masterpiece of 21st century film history. No other superhero film has been so celebrated and has been so influential on cinema. A lot of this has to do with the villain: the Jokersensationally played by Heath Ledger, who unfortunately passed away before the film was released.
The Joker was a force of nature, a villain the likes of which the movie world had perhaps never seen before. And Ledger made something even bigger, something incomparable, out of this already brilliant character. How does a single actor do that? Of course he had his role models — and what those are is well documented thanks to Ledger’s own notes during his preparation.
A psychological thriller inspired “The Dark Knight”
Warner Bros. Entertainment
Malcolm McDowell as Alexander DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange.
To portray the Joker as a calculating psychopath who is both crazy and charismatic at the same time, Ledger took one of the biggest scandal films of the 1970s as a reference: “Clockwork Orange”. The psychological thriller masterpiece by star director Stanley Kubrick is about the criminal Alexander DeLarge, who roams through a dystopian London with his youth gang and rages. He steals from the ruling elite in the most brutal way. One scene became legendary , in which he first rapes a woman and then beats up her husband while singing “Singin’ in the Rain”.
This creep was played congenially by Malcolm McDowell, whose mannerisms Ledger was strongly based on. Anyone who knows both films will notice how often Ledger, especially in his prancing way of wandering through the scenes, is strongly reminiscent of DeLarge – and still cooks his own soup. So for the movements he oriented himself slightly to “A Clockwork Orange”. But there is another source of inspiration that served him for the voice of the Joker.
Tom Waits was the role model for the Joker
Warner Bros. Entertainment
Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight.
On Interview with the musician Tom Waits, which was made for a TV broadcast in 1979, unmistakably served as a template for Ledger’s Joker. If you know “The Dark Knight” in the original English, it’s clear. In this interview, Waits sounds almost exactly like the Ledger interpretation of the Batman opponent. His nasal way of speaking, the vowels drawn out goes well with the folk musician’s charm, but as Ledger recognized, it’s also ideal as a counterpoint to the Dark Knight’s rasping rumble.
But Heath Ledger and his Joker were more than the sum of their parts. Despite visible assists, Ledger has the Joker a unique figure created that will serve as a paradigm for a perfect villain for a long time to come. A character who single-handedly turned an already high-class superhero film into a masterpiece like “The Dark Knight”.
