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An interview has emerged in which Jack Nicholson, speaking a few years ago, said he needed his interpretation of the Joker to be taken seriously. It had to be scary enough to unnerve a younger audience. It was the only way he felt he could make it work.
Nicholson starred as the DC villain in Tim Burton’s 1989 film Batman which saw Michael Keaton in the role of the eponymous caper crusader. Talking about the role, the Academy Award winning actor said he couldn’t be a bombastic cartoon bad guy.
He said, “I was afraid because of my feel of the television series and the way movies tend to be done and talked about. I didn’t want this to go through the normal, ‘Let’s brighten it up for the kids’. I thought this was a very strong — in every way — transitional movie about the genre, and really why they wanted me in there.”
“My early experience in working for an audience full of children: the more you scare them, the more they like it.” – Jack Nicholson
Peter Guber, who produced Batman, said Nicholson’s presence gave the comic book adaptation a legitimacy it wouldn’t have had otherwise. “It changed the nature of the ‘comic’ framework into a film — from a movie into a film with the inclusion of Jack Nicholson. There was something to be discovered there by the critics and by the media because they would find it intriguing that Jack wanted to do that.”
Guber compared Nicholson with Marlon Brando in 1978’s Superman. The producer said Nicholson took the role of Joker more seriously than anyone else involved in the project. He also knew kids would respond to a darker, more scary interpretation of the character.
“My early experience in working for an audience full of children: the more you scare them, the more they like it,” said Nicholson devilishly. “The worse you are, the better, because that was my response to the Joker. This is a hateful occurrence, this man, if you looked at it literally. Every kid loves this guy, I believe.”
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