All the world’s a stage for the Joker

Cesar Romero. Jack Nicholson. Heath Ledger. Jared Leto. Joaquin Phoenix. A Joker for every generation, these are the actors who brought the infamous DC villain to life, most to great notoriety. That doesn’t even cover the nearly dozen voice actors who have taken on the role in animated series and films. Mark Hamill, for instance, has voiced the character for 25 years, longer than any other actor and is nearly as beloved for being the Joker as he is for his work in Star Wars.

But it’s the recent film roles that have gained the most notoriety with actors taking on the role as if they were stepping into a new skin. Ledger went so deeply method for his performance in 2008’s The Dark Knight, that he was rumoured to have slept two hours a night throughout shooting, while locking himself up in his hotel room for a month in order to reach the manic state of the character. It worked out for the best, winning him a posthumous Best Actor Oscar.

Leto, when he took on the role in 2016’s illfated Suicide Squad, stayed in character throughout filming, which was predictably not fun for his co-stars, whom he “gifted” used condoms, anal beads and dead animals. The film went on to become a box-office and critical failure, with Leto’s chaotic performance widely panned.

This week, though, comes Phoenix, who tackles the character in Joker. The actor refused to do read-throughs, clashing with co-star Robert De Niro, who insisted on sticking with the traditional rehearsal process. He also lost a whopping 52 pounds for the role, admitting to Esquire that “you start to go mad” when you lose that much weight in a short amount of time. His performance is already earning rave reviews, while the film overall has been more polarizing.

Nevertheless, his and the approaches of every actor before him illustrate why the role of the Joker has become so hallowed. It’s a complicated character with endless layers. The origin stories of how he became a villain and even acquired his Glasgow smile are endless, painting him as both a cold-hearted murderer and a sympathetic victim of circumstance.

That’s an emotional spectrum ripe for exploration, particularly for an actor in the way of, say, a Macbeth or King Lear. In an interview with Collider, Phoenix himself said, “Maybe it’s like doing a play, like you always hear about people doing something, ‘You should have seen this actor in this performance,’ but then other actors do it, and it’s a different kind of film.”

Plays, by nature, are regularly restaged with new actors in the same roles. DC and Marvel, it seems, could be the screen version of this, with genre characters that go back decades thanks to their copious source material. Batman, too, has seen several iterations, played by Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Michael Keaton, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck and, soon, Robert Pattinson.

Each interpretation is different. The Joker, especially, is such an over-the-top persona — both tragic and comic — that he can be anything an actor wants him to be — for better or worse.