Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight became an instant cinema icon. It reinvented the way the popular Batman character has been seen on screen ever since. One of the more famous anecdotes that came out of the promotion for the film is when Michael Caine, who played Bruce Wayne’s trusty butler, Alfred Pennyworth, admitted that when he first saw Ledger in makeup and performance as the character, he got so startled that he forgot his lines. Caine has released his new memoir, Don’t Look Back, You’ll Trip Over: My Guide to Life, and the book would reveal more about his experience with Ledger’s Joker.
Variety reports that Caine wrote in his memoir,
The smeared makeup, the weird hair, the strange voice. It was chilling. Absolutely floored me the first time I saw him in action – I was terrified.”
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The British actor also noted how Ledger’s fearless performance as the Clown Prince of Crime had forced other cast members to “raise our game” while filming the movie. Caine gushed over Ledger’s accomplishment and his posthumous Oscar for the film. He wrote, “Heath was only 28 when he passed away. I hadn’t even made Zulu when I was that age. You think of what he might have gone on to achieve, it’s just heartbreaking.”
Caine also found that the release of The Dark Knight brought on an “intense” promotional tour since all the outlets wanted to talk about the cloud surrounding the death of Ledger well before the movie would reach screens. Caine recalls, “We were all terribly shocked, and it made doing the publicity for The Dark Knight that summer much more intense, because all the journalists wanted to talk about his death. It still makes me sad to think of it… [it’s] a performance for the ages. Even though his career was cut short so soon, he’ll be remembered as a great actor, I believe.”
Andrew Garfield worked with Ledger on The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and remembered him being very happy about his role as the Batman villain. “He had just done the Joker, he had just finished doing The Dark Knight, and he was so smug about it. I was like, ‘How did that go?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, it’s really good.’”
However, Heath Ledger wouldn’t find everything to be funny surrounding the promotion of The Dark Knight, especially with how some publications were depicting The Joker. “I remember his like, Empire magazine cover came out and he was like, ‘Oh, they used a f*cking sh*t photo. And I was like, ‘Are you kidding me, dude that looks f*cking incredible.’ And he was like, ‘Nah, the pose is all wrong, it looks kinda like a conventional version of what an actor…you’ll see.’ And yeah, I did see.” The cover in question, from Empire’s January 2008 edition, is a still from the scene where Ledger’s The Joker is in jail, accompanied by the insanely corny text, “He’s a cold-blooded, mass-murdering clown!”
