Christian Bale remembers his first scene opposite Heath Ledger
When it comes to hero-villain chemistry, few on-screen partnerships are more noteworthy than Heath Ledger and Christian Bale during Christopher Nolan’s movie The Dark Knight. Ledger altered audiences’ understanding of superhero villains, becoming the first actor to earn an Academy Award for playing a superhero character so utterly despicable. Many have used the actor’s death at the age of 28 as an example of the dangers of method acting, but Christian Bale still has nothing but praise for Ledger’s approach to the role of the Joker.
During a conversation with the Hollywood Reporter, Bale – who starred as Batman in Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises – recalled how Ledger’s talent made him feel utterly out of his depth: “Heath turned up, and just kind of completely ruined all my plans,” he said. “Because I went, ‘He’s so much more interesting than me and what I’m doing.’”
Remembering his first on-set exchange with Ledger, Bale continued: “Our first scene was in an interrogation room together, and I saw that he’s a helluva actor who’s completely committed to it and totally gets the tone that Chris [Nolan] is trying to create with this. We’re not going for actors revealing their enjoyment of playing a wacky caricature. We’re treating this as serious drama. You go into character and you stay in the character. I love that. I find that so ridiculous that I love it, and I take that very seriously. Heath was definitely embracing that. When he was in the makeup and the garb he was in character the whole time; and when he took it off he was absolutely fantastic company to be around.”
Pinpointing exactly what made Ledger’s Joker so unnerving, Bale added: “As you see in the movie, Batman starts beating the Joker and realises that this is not your ordinary foe. Because the more I beat him the more he enjoys it. The more I’m giving him satisfaction. Heath was behaving in a very similar fashion. He was kinda egging me on. I was saying, ‘You know what, I really don’t need to actually hit you. It’s going to look just as good if I don’t’. And he’s going, ‘Go on. Go on. Go on….’ He was slamming himself around, and there were tiled walls inside of that set which were cracked and dented from him hurling himself into them. His commitment was total.”
Bale went on to note that Ledger succeeded in breathing life and energy back into one of Batman’s stalest characters. When asked if he ever felt upstaged, the actor was quick to dismiss the idea: “No, not at all. Because it was exactly the point that I had a problem with in all of the other Batman movies,” he said. “Especially after reading Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One and various other graphic novels. I asked myself, ‘Well, how come it’s always been that he’s the most boring character?’ I’d never found him to be intriguing at all. Whereas these graphic novels depicted him as by far the most fascinating of them. I feel like we gained that back with Batman Begins — that he’s a character with substance.”
You can revisit one of Ledger and Bale’s best on-screen moments below.
