Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)
By the time 2008 rolled around, fans’ idea of Batman had been totally reinvented. The camp of the ’60s was long, long gone and books like The Killing Joke, A Death In The Family, and Arkham Asylum had established Joker more strongly in recent memory than any slapstick gags. Joker was, at this point, well known and understood as a psychopath and a murderer, and Heath Ledger’s role in The Dark Knight only cemented that concept further.
Ledger’s Joker was messy, anxiety-inducing, and brutal. He shed all the cartoon trappings of his predecessors in favor of an edge that would go on to define live-action Jokers for years to come. This is where we began to see the adaptations really lean into some of the ideas the comics had been passively playing with for years. Things like Joker being a completely unreliable narrator when it came to his own stories, the fact that he killed without motivation, that his fixation of Batman really had nothing to do with his own past at all, that it was only a flight of fancy for him with no deeper meaning at all. The sharply dressed, novelty gag slinging clown of the ’60s and ’80s was long, long gone and in his place, there was one of the most horrifying men in Gotham.
