How the Joker saved Jack Nicholson’s career: “I was losing it a little in the quality department”
Jack Nicholson‘s 40-year career as arguably the greatest leading man in Hollywood yielded some incredible films.
Over the years, he starred in undisputed classics like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chinatown, Easy Rider, As Good as It Gets, and Terms of Endearment, earning a record 12 Oscar nominations. Yet, alongside these critically acclaimed roles, Nicholson was also known for taking on crowd-pleasing parts that leaned into his mischievous, hell-raising persona. In fact, he once claimed that one of these roles actually saved his career—though not for the reason you might expect.
In 2004, Nicholson sat down with Total Film to discuss his incredible filmography. The iconic star gave fascinating insights into how he had picked roles at specific points in his career. For example, at that time, he was promoting Something’s Gotta Give, his third comedy in a row after indie dramedy About Schmidt and the much broader Adam Sandler vehicle Anger Management.
Nicholson was asked why he seemed to be in the mood to make audiences laugh in the early 2000s, and the actor revealed he was responding to real-life events. “The way I reacted to 9/11 was I decided I didn’t want to do any movies that are sad or critical,” he explained. “I decided I didn’t want to make my living depressing people or making them go home sick, so I just decided I wanted to do comedy for a while and study it for a while.” It was a unique glimpse into the mind of a man whose choices had always been singular but perhaps not so often a direct attempt to provide some light in a dark world.
A Nancy Meyers rom-com like Something’s Gotta Give was always going to be something that mass audiences gravitated toward, so the interviewer asked Nicholson about another period in his career when he seemingly sought to dominate the box office. In 1989, Nicholson starred as the Clown Prince of Crime, The Joker, in Tim Burton’s Batman, and the film was a cultural phenomenon. At the time of release, it became the sixth highest-grossing movie in history and spawned a merchandising empire that has rarely been equalled. Nicholson cut one of the most lucrative deals in Hollywood history for the film, walking away with anywhere between $50-$90million, thanks to a stipulation stating that he should receive a cut of the box office and merchandise profits.
Nicholson has always been glowing about how much fun he had playing the colourful comic book villain, but he admitted to Total Film that after the movie’s release, he had something of an epiphany. He mused, “Around the time of Batman, I realised I was fooling around career-wise. It was great work and a great film, but I didn’t want to be seen as this crazy Joker figure anymore.”
He knew that general audiences loved his riotous performance in the movie but grew uncomfortable with the implications of continuing down that path. “I had a conversation with myself, a real heart-to-heart, and decided I didn’t like people thinking of me as a fool,” he confessed.
The beloved star surveyed his career at the time, defined by Batman and his scenery-chewing performance as the devilish Daryl Van Horne in The Witches of Eastwick, and knew he needed to course correct, “I’d done such good work, whether it was Goin’ South or One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest or Easy Rider,” he said. “But I think I was kind of losing it a little in the quality department. I was doing some movies that I should have backed away from.”
So, after Batman, Nicholson didn’t pursue any more supervillain roles or star in action blockbusters. Instead, he made a sequel to his neo-noir classic Chinatown, reunited with his Five Easy Pieces director Bob Rafelson on the black comedy Man Trouble, and then attempted to blow Tom Cruise off the screen with his fearsome supporting turn in A Few Good Men. That landed him yet another Oscar nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ – something he was never likely to achieve if he kept playing characters like The Joker.
