One Clown, Four Doors

The Joker is a useful character for anybody who believes there is one right way to prepare a role, because he has been played well in completely incompatible ways.

In the 1960s television series of Batman, Cesar Romero played him as a cackling showman, and declined to shave his moustache, so the white make-up was painted over it. It is visible in close-up. Nobody minded; it was that kind of show.

In 1989 Jack Nicholson played him in Tim Burton's Batman. Nicholson's Joker was built from the outside: the grin, the purple suit, the dance moves, a performance pitched at opera rather than realism. It was enormously enjoyable and nobody suggested it had cost him anything except, perhaps, some dignity, which he seemed glad to spend.

Then came Heath Ledger, in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, released in July 2008.

Ledger described his preparation in interviews before the film came out. He shut himself away for something like a month, worked on the voice and the posture, read, experimented, and kept a diary written as the character, full of notes and images. That diary is real; his father later showed pages from it in a documentary. The performance that resulted is twitchy, wet-lipped and unpredictable, and it is generally regarded as one of the defining screen villains.

Ledger did not live to see it released. He died in January 2008 in New York, of an accidental overdose of prescription medication: painkillers, sleeping pills and anti-anxiety drugs taken together. The medical examiner ruled the death accidental. In February 2009 he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and his family accepted it on his behalf.

Almost immediately, another story formed. In this version, the character had got inside him. He had gone too deep, could not climb back out, and the Joker killed him.

It is worth being clear: that story is not supported by the record, and the people best placed to know have rejected it. His family have said he loved the role and was having fun with it. Colleagues described a man enjoying himself, inventing, laughing between takes. Ledger had talked about trouble sleeping, and that line was stitched into the myth, but insomnia is not possession, and the drugs that killed him were not a character's idea.

Why does the myth survive? Because it flatters a romantic belief about acting: that real art requires real danger, that the best performances are a kind of haunting. It is a better story than the truth, which is that a talented young man died of a common and preventable accident, and that his best work happened to be released afterwards. The myth also does a quieter harm. It suggests to young actors that the right way to prepare is to let a role damage you.

In 2019 Joaquin Phoenix played the character again, in Todd Phillips's Joker, a film that owes more to Scorsese's Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy than to any comic. Phoenix went in through the body. He lost around fifty pounds, by his own account, and the film lingers on his twisted shoulder blades and the uncontrolled laugh he developed for it. He won Best Actor.

That made the Joker the second character, after Vito Corleone, to win Oscars for two different actors. In both cases the two performances have very little in common, which is the point.

Put the four side by side. Romero barely changed anything and was right for his show. Nicholson worked from the outside in and gave a grand, comic turn. Ledger worked in solitude, building the character from writing and voice. Phoenix worked through hunger and movement. None of these is the correct method. Each actor found the door that opened for him, in the film he was actually making.

That is the lesson of this whole book, stated as plainly as it can be. There is no single right way into a role, and the way that makes the best story is not, for that reason, the best way. The performances are the evidence. The legends are something else.