(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
The Hollywood landscape in 2024 is almost entirely at the mercy of blockbusters. These days, the release schedule is predominantly comprised of enormous $200million IP adaptations, sequels, and reboots, and it’s led to a shift in how actors approach talking about parts in such movies. In essence, they tend to pander to the fans by waxing lyrical about the respect they have for playing a character they’d likely never heard of a year before. Back in the ’80s, though, an A-list actor like Jack Nicholson admitting they took a role in a blockbuster so seriously that it scared him would have been almost unheard of – even if said movie was the one that arguably gave birth to the IP boom we’re living through today.
Throughout the ’80s, Warner Bros was desperate to seize upon the success of 1978’s Superman: The Movie by finally getting another iconic DC superhero to the big screen. For much of the decade, scripts were written and scrapped, and actors were approached and abandoned before Batman finally came together as a package featuring Tim Burton as director, Michael Keaton as the Dark Knight, and Nicholson as The Joker. Indeed, despite names like John Lithgow, Tim Curry, Ray Liotta, Brad Dourif, and even David Bowie being considered to play the pasty-faced Clown Prince of Crime, Nicholson had been the studio’s ideal pick since as early as 1980.
Therefore, Nicholson knew he had Warner right where he wanted them, and he negotiated a deal that is still spoken about in hushed whispers to this day. He lowered his usual $10million fee to $6million on the proviso that he’d receive a significant cut of the film’s box office and merchandise revenue, which led to him walking away with anything between $50 and $90million. The iconic star also negotiated top billing in the film and a schedule that allowed him time off for any Los Angeles Lakers home games – which is nice work if you can get it.
However, none of this is to say that Nicholson was a mercenary who didn’t care about playing The Joker. In fact, the opposite was true. Nicholson once told Esquire, “I was particularly proud of my performance as the Joker. I considered it a piece of pop art,” and in a rare interview conducted in 2005 for a Batman DVD release, he revealed just how seriously he took his seemingly un-serious job.
Fascinatingly, Nicholson began by revealing he was nervous about signing up for the role because he feared the studio would want to make an updated version of the campy ’60s Adam West TV incarnation of Batman. “I didn’t want this to go through the normal, ‘Let’s brighten it up for the kids,’” Nicholson mused.
This showed he was always on board with Burton’s dark, gothic approach to the material, which would have flown in the face of what the general public knew about Batman at the time. So, while other people in the industry dismissed Batman as “just another cartoon movie,” the Oscar-winning Nicholson treated it “more seriously than probably anyone in the world.”
When putting together his terrifying yet hilarious performance as the vengeful gangster clown, Nicholson drew upon his early career experiences of performing for children. Back then, he realised that performers should never talk down to kids or cater their material to what they think a child can handle. Instead, he found that he got the best results when he tried to frighten them. As he said with a devilish grin, “The more you scare them, the more they like it. The worse you are, the better.”
Ultimately, Nicholson’s performance as The Joker helped legitimise the comic book genre in Hollywood, and the merchandising bonanza it generated helped lay the groundwork for the modern IP boom. But hey, you can’t blame Nicholson for that – he was just a guy who wanted to scare costumed vigilantes and little kids alike.
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