#125 – Thirteen Things about Heath Ledger as The Joker
1. Heath’s Joker is like none other; he made the insanity truly terrifying, because we were riveted to his character’s every word & move. 1BadMom
2. Heath Ledger…um, he was terrifying and so beautiful just lost in a performance. As someone who loves acting and dissects every performance I have ever seen, there are very few that are flawless, and this is one of them. He beats out Hannibal Lector as the most captivating screen villain I could imagine. He is both musical and halting, there were gasps in the theater over his performance. – A comment by Jennifer from a review by Carl
3. It’s a stupendously creepy performance, wild but never over the top. Newsweek
4. “…and he was not a sympathetic character but there were times when you just HAD to laugh. that nurse thing? omg!” The Planet of Janet
5. “...the Joker is more than a villain. He’s a Mephistopheles whose actions are fiendishly designed to pose moral dilemmas for his enemies.” “Heath Ledger has a good deal of dialogue in the movie, and a lot of it isn’t the usual jabs and jests we’re familiar with: It’s psychologically more complex, outlining the dilemmas he has constructed, and explaining his reasons for them.” Roger Ebert
6. “I can only speak superlatives of Ledger, who is mad-crazy-blazing brilliant as the Joker.” “…Ledger takes the role to the shadows, where even what’s comic is hardly a relief.” Rolling Stone
7. “What doesn’t kill you only makes you… stranger…” Heath Ledger as The Joker
8. “When Ledger wields a knife, he is thoroughly terrifying (do not, despite the PG-13 rating, bring the children), and, as you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering—in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism—how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss.” Gawker
9. “Ledger seems to have understood [his sole inspiration is to create chaos], and brings an appropriate — and riveting — unpredictability to the role. It’s also a neat touch that his makeup, which looked like a slapdash effort from the start, steadily deteriorates, streaking, cracking and peeling away as the film progresses; it’s an outward manifestation of his psychological spiral.” NDTV
10. “In this, the last performance he completed before his death, Ledger had a maniacal gusto inspired enough to suggest that he might have lived to be as audacious an actor as Marlon Brando, and maybe as great.” EW
11. “…his Joker is a creature of such ghastly life, and the performance is so visceral, creepy and insistently present that the characterization pulls you in almost at once. When the Joker enters one fray with a murderous flourish and that sawed-off smile, his morbid grin a mirror of the Black Dahlia’s ear-to-ear grimace, your nervous laughter will die in your throat.” NY Times
12. “It’s a tribute to the power of Heath Ledger’s transcendent performance in The Dark Knight that we can watch him, transfixed and deeply unsettled by the character’s creepiness, laugh at his comic menace, and still manage to block out thoughts of the actor’s tragic and untimely death.” USA Today
13. “Ledger’s performance is a grim triumph, and his untimely death only emboldened his Joker’s lurching creepiness.” Gawker
