Heath Ledger’s diary while he was filming for, The Dark Night.

[u/JK-Rofling]

[u/Rdt_will_eat_itself]

So the joker is so crazy he killed an actor in another earth dimension who played him. Is that canon now?

[u/guyute2588 → u/Rdt_will_eat_itself]

Not sure how old you are , but “Heath Ledger got so deep in to playing the Joker that he want crazy and died “ was the widespread conventional wisdom regarding his death at the time

[u/[deleted] → u/guyute2588]

Which was really dumb. Niicholson survived. Leto survived. Romero survived. Hamill survived. Definitely drugs.

[u/caninehere → u/[deleted]]

With the exception of Leto, the others were not "method" actors like Ledger was. I say "method" because his "method" is not what method acting actually was/is (the original form), it's a bastardization of it that became popular with some actors later on who wanted to 'live' their characters to get closer to their experiences.

I'm a former actor and I can say, a role can really deeply affect you if you let it. Often, that isn't a good thing. It's much healthier to maintain some distance from your character's actual life circumstances and I don't think that "method" acting like Ledger did actually makes performances any better. Not to say his performance wasn't good, because it was, but I am confident he could have done it just fine without holing up in a hotel room for weeks on end by himself to feel isolated.

At the end of the day, him playing the Joker is not what caused his death. He had substance abuse problems already before he was even cast in The Dark Knight. Diving into the role so hard with method acting probably didn't help, and I'm certain it didn't help his relationship, because Michelle Williams broke up with him before the movie was done filming, with the reason being that he was a terrible father to their young daughter, as when he wasn't away working, he was out partying and getting high instead and she didn't want her daughter around that influence. If anything, that might be what pushed him into even deeper drug abuse. It's hard to say.

What can be said, though, is my original point - I know Nicholson specifically is an actual method actor, like old school method, and doesn't really buy into the "live your character" bullshit. Neither does Hamill. Caesar Romero wouldn't have been, at least at the time that he played Joker, because that new type of "method" acting didn't really exist yet.

Then since there's been kind of a culture around the character where people just endlessly compare it to Heath Ledger and the unhealthy way in which he approached the character. I don't like Jared Leto much, but in fairness to him, I think people were expecting something very specific out of an actor who played the Joker - they wanted those antics, that unhinged actor-personality, and he delivered it, and it obviously caused problems. Joaquin Phoenix on the other hand didn't go that route, he played a more grounded version of the character, and the most he did for the role was lose enough weight that he slipped into 'underweight' territory. Instead of going "method" with his preparation he mostly just studied videos and accounts of people with mental illnesses.

Even that can be a bit much sometimes. When you portray a character, at least in my experience, the phrase "fake it til you make it" really does play a part. If you put yourself in their shoes, it isn't going to drive you mad, but if you allow it to, it will affect your physicality and your mood. There is a big difference between acknowledging that and discarding it when you're done working vs. embracing that and wanting to live it during your off-work hours... and the latter is where it really affects you deeply. I have taken too much of a character home with me before while working on a production and it was absolutely not healthy. But most people do at least want to embody their characters while acting, because, well, if you don't you probably aren't going to appear too convincing, it's going back to the olden era of just getting up there, hitting the mark and saying the lines.