Heath Ledger's Last Interview

Heath Ledger's death at the turn of the year was, in a word, chilling. Sure, he was young and famous. But more than that, the Australian had recently completed work on his twisted turn as The Joker in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins sequel The Dark Knight. Whispers of the enormity of his performance had just begun to filter through. After his death, they were everywhere. Spooky and everywhere.

With the film hitting cinemas very soon, FHM decided to do some serious digging. We've got our hands on the late actor's last interview, conducted on set in Chicago at the tail end of 2007. It's fascinating stuff, and makes an awesome prologue to what will certainly be the best superhero film yet. How do we know? Because we've seen it - and the one-word review reads like this: "Awesome."

How are you?

I just got off a plane. I was picked up at 4am from my house this morning in LA. It’s okay.

Are you lucid enough to tell all?

(laughs) You caught me at a good moment.

Everyone said that you were fearless taking on this role, is that really true?

I definitely feared it. Anything that fears me, I guess, excites me at the same time and so I don’t know if I was fearless, but I certainly had to put on a brave face and believe that I had something up my sleeve and something that was different.

Did you watch any of the Jack Nicholson stuff?

Oh yeah. (laughs) I mean, not after I got the role, but I’ve seen it many times before, I was a huge fan of it and having seen Chris’ first film, I knew that there’s a big difference between a Chris Nolan film and a Tim Burton film and so therefore there was enough room for a fresh portrayal and so I’ve kind of steered away from what Jack did (laughs) hopefully.

In what way?

I don’t know. I’m not at liberty to say. (laughs)

How did you build your character? Did you start with the comic books or the movies or the tv series?

A bit of both. Like I sat around a hotel room in London, for about a month and I just locked myself away and formed a little diary and experimented with voices and I’ll answer your question (laughs), he’s you know I ended up making him within the realm of a psychopath kind of like zero empathy or very little to no conscience towards his acts which is fun because there’s no real limits on their boundaries to what he would say or how he would say something or what he would do. So, yeah that, I don’t know it’s always a very personal process in terms of how you land in your characters shoes, so to speak, and it’s a combination of reading all the comic books I could and the script, and then just really closing my eyes and meditating on it, you know? Chris and I very much saw, see eye to eye on how the character should be played, and that was evident from the first kind of meeting we had on the project. We both had identical images in our minds and so I went away, found it, came back.

Do we see the man behind The Joker?

I don’t know. (laughs) I really don’t know what to say, I feel like I’ll be assassinated if I tell you something wrong…

We know there’s a prologue, but we don’t know exactly what is in that...

Okay, I’m really not sure what I’m allowed to say. (laughs)

Again, with that process of getting into The Joker is the idea that he may have once been a normal person?

Yeah, I think most of the villains in kind of the Chris Nolan style of Batman movies are normal people, once were normal people. I definitely kind of came to my own conclusions to his background and but one thing, and I don’t know whether I’d be putting my foot in my mouth by giving you that, I guess it’s my secret too at this point so I don’t know. This is the first time I’d had to speak about it and no ones really prepped me and (laughs) on what I can say or not...