The performance Jack Nicholson took more seriously than anybody else
One of the biggest movies of 2025 is Paul Thomas Anderson’s new offering, One Battle After Another, and a big part of that is Leonardo DiCaprio.
DiCaprio sells his character incredibly well. From freedom fighter to deadbeat dad to drunk recluse to caring father, every single aspect of his character feels well fleshed out and perfectly revised. It’s not like DiCaprio hadn’t got accolades before this one, but following One Battle After Another, one of the best compliments an actor can receive was repeated by many, as DiCaprio was called the new Jack Nicholson.
You can certainly see where the comparisons come from. He approached his character with a chaos and an attachment which certainly seemed akin to the work of Nicholson, who took a similar approach. It’s a marvel to watch, and if you’re DiCaprio, you would no doubt feel deeply complemented by the notion that you’re the reimagining of one of the greatest actors to ever take to the screen.
If you ever find yourself debating whether Nicholson was one of the best to do it, you shouldn’t look at his most renowned performances, but instead some of his other roles, ones he didn’t win Oscars for. These are some roles that a lot of actors would struggle to get anything from, but that Nicholson took seriously and managed to deliver layered performances of. A great example of this is his portrayal of the Joker in the 1989 movie Batman.
You might roll your eyes at the notion that some people couldn’t draw much from a character like The Joker, given Heath Ledger won an Oscar for his mesmerising, layered and tortured portrayal of the character; however, you have to keep in mind that there is a big difference between a Batman movie in the ‘80s and a Batman movie in 2008. They weren’t as dark or as well thought out as some of the pictures you see now, they literally tried to throw the comic on the screen, which is why so many of those old comic book movies are incredibly silly.
This isn’t me saying that a silly comic book movie is a bad thing; there is a big market for these kinds of films, and fans love them, but they don’t offer a lot of room for actors to give a spellbinding performance… or so you would think. Nicholson delivered an impassioned performance in his role as the Joker, and it’s one that fans still look back on fondly.
Nicholson admitted he took the role incredibly seriously and intended to scare any kids who might be watching. “To this day I always took this performance more seriously than probably anybody in the world cos I looked at it that way,” he said when discussing the role, “My early experience told me from working for an audience full of children, the more you scare them, the more they like it. The worse you are, the better.”
Any other actor would have likely gotten that costume and that script and decided to play the role and leave, but not Nicholson. He portrayed evil incredibly well, even in what is fundamentally quite a silly comic book movie.
