Why were so many of today’s top stars inspired to act by Heath Ledger in ‘The Dark Knight?’
When generations of male actors discuss their inspirations for pursuing the craft, a few names tend to tower over the rest. The generation that came of age in the 1990s, such as Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, was heavily influenced by the stars of the New Hollywood era, such as Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Jack Nicholson. Those seminal stars, in turn, all seem to worship at the altar of Marlon Brando, who changed acting forever in the ’50s by embracing realism for the first time.
These days, the top young actors in Hollywood include the likes of Timothée Chalamet, Tom Holland, Austin Butler, Jacob Elordi, and Paul Mescal. The oldest of that group is Butler at 33, but the rest are all 28 or 29, meaning their main acting influences likely came along in the ’00s. Unlike previous generations, though, several of these stars have directly stated they were inspired to start acting by one specific performance, instead of an actor’s body of work, and that performance is Heath Ledger’s searing turn as The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 masterpiece, The Dark Knight.
Dune and Call Me By Your Name star Chalamet once told The Last Magazine, “I saw The Dark Knight when I was 13, before I applied for LaGuardia [Acting Studio], and Heath Ledger made me want to act”. Then, during a New York Film Critics Circle Award acceptance speech in 2018, he doubled down by saying, “I left that theatre a changed man, and I’m serious about that. Heath Ledger’s performance in that film was visceral and viral to me. And I now had the acting bug.”
Elordi, who sprang to fame through HBO’s Euphoria and later starred in Priscilla and Saltburn, has reiterated many times in interviews that his fellow Australian’s terrifying performance as the ‘Clown Prince of Crime’ lit his fuse. He recalled watching the film at 11 years old with his father, and having his mind blown by the now-iconic “magic trick” scene. “I think that was the first time I remember watching Heath Ledger,” he recalled, “when he’s like, ‘How about a magic trick?’ and he slammed that guy’s head into the pencil, and the pencil disappeared. I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do. Whatever that is, that’s what I want to do’.”
Butler, star of Elvis and the upcoming Caught Stealing, revealed that his villainous performance in Dune: Part Two was at least partially inspired by Ledger and “the sense of play that he had” as the Joker. And Jonathan Majors, who looked as though he was set for leading man stardom before he was shockingly convicted of domestic abuse, once wrote an entire essay for Variety on how much The Dark Knight and Ledger’s Joker meant to him.
“My 18-year-old self sat in the cinema long after the credits rolled, gobsmacked by a beauty and complexity of humanity hitherto unwitnessed in cinema and, dare I say, in my own existence,” Majors wrote, perhaps overegging the pudding with flowery prose a bit too much. However, the sentiment was clear, and Majors revealed Ledger’s energy and disregard for his own well-being in the film stunned him. “He threw his body around,” Majors told Entertainment Weekly, “He was so full. And I went, ‘I’m coming for that. I’m inspired’. It takes a lot, you feel me? To be inspired.”
While it’s troubling that Ledger’s performance also inspired someone like Majors, it must be said that art can’t be held accountable for someone’s actions in real life, and he is merely included here as another example of an actor who went on record about Ledger’s influence.
Nevertheless, this evidence suggests it’s perhaps not a stretch to claim that without Ledger’s legendarily frightening, grease-paint streaked incarnation of the most famous comic book villain of all time, the stars of a host of major motion pictures may have never pursued acting, or, at the very least, would have sought inspiration elsewhere, with no guarantee of finding it. One performance can rarely be directly labelled as the inciting incident in an actor’s passion, yet Ledger’s Joker has a handful of acolytes plying their trade at the top of Hollywood.
Why is this the case, though? Why did Ledger asking, “Why so serious?” and “You wanna know how I got these scars?” profoundly affect the young minds of Chalamet, Elordi, and Butler? I believe the key is in something Chalamet said to The Last Magazine, when he seemed slightly bashful about admitting a superhero movie made him want to act. “I know it’s cheesy and not as sophisticated as saying I watched Citizen Kane, and that made me want to embrace the art of filmmaking,” he reasoned, “but that was the movie of my generation.”
Indeed, though superhero movies have (often rightfully) become cultural punching bags that have been widely decried as the death of cinema in the last two decades, it can’t be understated how vital The Dark Knight was to an entire generation of audiences, filmmakers, and actors. In the wake of its billion-dollar success, every studio in Hollywood tried to ape Nolan’s filmmaking style, with decidedly mixed results. And after Ledger burned so brightly as the Joker and then tragically left this earth, it gave his performance an extra level of poignancy and aura that practically leapt off the screen.
As much as some cinephiles might not want to admit it, The Dark Knight truly was the movie of its generation, and Ledger’s Joker the performance that countless actors have been stirred into action by. It felt like lightning in a bottle in ’08 for a reason, and its reverberations are still being felt today.
