Actors and musicians sometimes encounter a challenge other artists and creatives don’t: Interpreting the work of others. Sure, writers might twist a classic into a modern form or tell an old story in a new way, but it’s not precisely the same. Actors and musicians often find themselves asked to reinterpret a role or song without fundamentally changing the words and other aspects of the performance. Think about that—you have the same words, the same basic stage direction, the same overall form, and you’re supposed to do something new and exciting with it.
For actors, as a result, there’s usually a role that everyone has tried at some point or another in their career. For a while that role was Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the glum and slightly crazy Prince of Denmark charged by his father’s ghost with avenging his murder. When Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to poke fun at his limited range and thick Austrian accent in 1993’s Last Action Hero, he imagined himself reciting the infamous ‘Yorick’ soliloquy from the play, riffing on the idea that Arnie might try his hand at a serious role like that. It was pop culture shorthand. Almost every ‘serious’ actor has tried to put his own stamp on Hamlet, your Oliviers and Gielguds, and when Kenneth Branagh was riding the crest of his Hot Young Classicist phase, he used his currency to make a 4-hour film version of the play that let him chew some serious scenery. For actresses there are, unsurprisingly, fewer such roles—fewer such characters—with which to define themselves, but the Austen roles of Emma and Elizabeth or perhaps Brontë’s Jane Eyre come around every few years, and can make a career in similar fashion.
Recently, Hamlet has fallen out of favor. Not among Shakespeare fans or classicists (or even among actors), but in a pop culture sense; there hasn’t been a screen adaptation since 2009 and you sure don’t hear any buzz about the role when actors take it on. Into this vacuum we have a new role, a new character that actors will try to make their own: The Joker.
Why So Serious?
Credit where
credit is due: The first iconic performance in the role of The Joker
was Cesar Romero on the 1960s-era Batman TV
show. In part because it was television (there was a theatrical film
starring Romero as The Joker, but it was really just a super-sized
episode) and in part because it was a terminally silly show, Romero’s
performance is rarely mentioned in the same breath as the actors that
followed, but it is a remarkable
performance. Romero brings some real manic pixie dream Joker energy
to his performance. His Joker is constantly laughing, playing pranks,
and always in motion, and yet there’s a sour thread of real menace
there. Romero’s Joker is always laughing at
you—at your pain and suffering—never with you.
But to be fair,
Joker wasn’t an iconic role in the 1960s, and Romero’s robust
performance has little to do with its late bloom as the new Hamlet
for actors. That began in 1989 with Jack Nicholson.
Tim Burton’s Batman is a terrible movie. You might have fond memories of it—as I do—but it is … not good. It was, however, a smash hit and a cultural phenomenon, in part because of Nicholson, who was still an A+ movie star, a serious actor, and an outsize celebrity personality back then. Hearing that an actor of Nicholson’s caliber had signed on to portray a character previously portrayed by Cesar Romero was surprising, and instantly elevated the role to a higher status. If Nicholson could play The Joker, after all, anyone could play The Joker, even the biggest names in Hollywood.
And Nicholson’s
performance is good-to-great. He’s not sure how to handle the
silliness, which was still a part of Joker’s DNA in 1989; you can
almost see the drugs in Nicholson’s eyes when he’s forced to
prance about like a silly clown. But he also brought a real sense of
psychotic danger to the role; you can see echoes of Nicholson’s
brutal shifts from maniacal silliness to coldblooded violence in more
recent portrayals, and some of his line readings are absolute
classics. Nicholson took the role seriously,
and thus made it a role that you could
take seriously.
Which opened the door for Heath Ledger two decades later. Ledger’s performance is legendary, of course; he won an Oscar for it, after all. Consider Cesar Romero in 1966 and Heath Ledger in 2008—the same role, and yet so vastly different in gravitas and approach. Ledger’s performance is in every way brilliant, from the flat, nasally Midwestern accent he affects to the twitches and tics he indulges in, to the sudden growl he puts in his voice when he echoes Nicholson and downshifts from silly to homicidal. More than anyone else, Heath Ledger made The Joker the new Hamlet, a role that can define a career (for good or bad, as we’ll see) and which young actors will aspire to when they want to assert themselves as serious actors.
The Crucible
Ledger’s performance is what made The Joker the sort of role that serious actors would accept with the intention of leaving their mark on it. Jared Leto attempted to make the role his own in 2016’s Suicide Squad with disastrous results; his take on the character is what a fifteen-year old kid who shares memes about releasing their inner demons would come up with. While the performance is … bad, what’s notable is how Leto clearly wants to make the role his own. There’s obviously a sense that The Joker is the sort of iconic role that you are remembered for, and Leto’s frenzied, desperate energy in the performance reflects that.
Which brings us to Joaquin Phoenix and 2019’s Joker, which has raked in awards and made Phoenix a serious contender for Best Actor. Phoenix’s interpretation of the role is quite different from all the other Jokers, and the film’s success (and the success of his performance) has solidified the role’s new stature. Phoenix hasn’t pursued the sort of career that would normally bring him into a superhero universe like D.C.’s, and it’s hard to imagine him appearing in an effects-heavy fight scene with Robert Pattinson’s Batman, so it’s easy to speculate that what attracted him to the role was, in part, its iconic status. Simply put, if you want to make a splash as an actor, try your best to get cast as The Joker. If you nail it, people will take you seriously.
Which is, in some ways, perfect for our current moment. There’s something appropriate about this shift from Shakespeare’s glowering Prince of Denmark to a comic book villain as the defining role for actors, something appropriate in having a maniacal clown as our most important fictional portrayal. The world has become a darkly funny place. To paraphrase another kind of fictional joker, “Once you realize what a joke everything is, being The Joker is the only thing that makes sense.”
