Line for line this interrogation scene, if you want to call it that, with the Joker is just creepy. I have to wonder what Christian Bale was thinking when he had to sit across the table from Heath Ledger and listen to him ramble through his lines and sound completely nuts despite the fact that he was playing a part. Both men have been known to go overboard for a part and both men know the depths of madness that they can succumb to.
This though was something unique. Almost every Joker since the live action show back in the day was nuts, but they were a controlled crazy, a type of chaos that still had defined boundaries and wouldn’t stray past them. Ledger was not that type of Joker. Even Jared Leto didn’t go as nuts as Ledger even when he tried. The character actor that Leto is could not hope to match Ledger despite his drop into the mind of the clown prince.
Ledger was the guy that dropped so far into his role that he became that person, at least with the Joker. The haunting way he dipped so easily into the madness was unnerving then and it still is now. To take even a peek into his mind as he was preparing for this role would have been to invite the worst sort of madness that you could have imagined, the type that there is no coming back from. Heath Ledger was admittedly a troubled young man but he was also a brilliant actor that was gone from this life far too soon. One has to wonder if this role was too much for him or if too much was crowding in while he was attempting to bring the Joker to life.
No matter what the case was he did something that only one man has ever come close to and that was to bring the worst and most persistent villain in the entire Batman franchise to life in a way that literally scared the living hell out of a lot of people. He was unpredictable, he was crazy, he was simply scary to look at and to watch. You got the since that in some cases he wasn’t acting but just reacting to the scene in front of him. He was doing what the Joker would have done. And the only man to come close to matching him? The same guy that put the newest spin on the Joker in his own time, Jack Nicholson.
If you want the Joker, you want a man that can get crazy without provocation or hesitation. You want someone that can grin at you and chuckle even as they’re reaching around to shove a knife in your back to match the one they just stuck in your guts. You want a man to whom crazy is just another word, and the reality of it is something so much worse that to even think about it is to start chuckling for absolutely no reason at all.
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