Ledger Talks 'The Dark Knight'

2007 interview with the late actor shows up

By: Brad Brevet
Published: Wednesday, June 25th 2008 at 5:35 PM

Photo: Warner Bros.

FHM was on the set of The Dark Knight while it was filming in Chicago and had the chance to interview Heath Ledger regarding his role as The Joker.

The interview is quite good and doesn't really spoil much, but I will admit I only skimmed it and actually avoided the answers to a few of the questions. It is a little hard to read the words directly from Ledger's mouth, something I don't believe will bother me when I see him on screen portraying a completely different person. His death remains the first real celebrity death that actually shocked me, I guess that just means I am getting up their in age as the people you grew up watching begin to pass away you can't help but feel a lost connection.

Here is a snippet or two from the interview, but you can get the complete deal right here.

How did you build your character? Did you start with the comic books or the movies or the TV series?

A bit of both. Like I sat around a hotel room in London, for about a month and I just locked myself away and formed a little diary and experimented with voices and I'll answer your question (laughs), he's you know I ended up making him within the realm of a psychopath kind of like zero empathy or very little to no conscience towards his acts which is fun because there's no real limits on their boundaries to what he would say or how he would say something or what he would do. So, yeah that, I don't know it's always a very personal process in terms of how you land in your characters shoes, so to speak, It's a combination of reading all the comic books I could and the script, and then just really closing my eyes and meditating on it. Chris and I very much see eye to eye on how the character should be played, and that was evident from the first kind of meeting we had on the project. We both had identical images in our minds and so I went away, found it, came back.

Do we see the man behind The Joker?

I don't know. (laughs) I really don't know what to say, I feel like I'll be assassinated if I tell you something wrong…

We know there's a prologue, but we don't know exactly what is in that

OK, I'm really not sure what I'm allowed to say (laughs)

Again, with that process of getting into The Joker, is the idea that he may have once been a normal person?

Yeah, I think most of the villains in kind of the Chris Nolan style of Batman movies are normal people, once were normal people. I definitely kind of came to my own conclusions to his background and but one thing, and I don't know whether I'd be putting my foot in my mouth by giving you that, I guess it's my secret too at this point so I don't know. This is the first time I'd had to speak about it and no ones really prepped me and (laughs) on what I can say or not.

Links from Other Sites You May Like