The Joker's Lip-Licking Tick In The Dark Knight Started As A Practicality
There's nothing I can say about Heath Ledger's Joker that hasn't been said. But, just by way of reminding us all just how influential his performance was, here's a brief précis.
The late actor's portrayal of Batman's greatest villain is widely regarded as the finest on-screen representation of the Clown Prince of Crime, and arguably gave us the greatest movie villain of the 21st Century. This enduring performance is still influential some 15 years after "The Dark Knight" first debuted. As just one small example, Shamier Anderson's Mr. Nobody from "John Wick: Chapter 4" was inspired by the character.
Ledger planned to return as the Joker, and who knows what he would have done had he not sadly passed away at the age of 28, shortly before "The Dark Knight" released. As it stands, the actor delivered more than enough with his role in Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins" sequel, in one of those rare instances where everything just seemed to come together perfectly.
At the time he was cast in "The Dark Knight," Ledger was already building a reputation as a talented character actor, having starred in 2005's "Brokeback Mountain" and coming off the drama based on Bob Dylan's life "I'm Not There." And with the Joker, he seemed to have found the perfect role to cement that reputation. Ledger's anarchic energy and scene-stealing presence is what most will remember about his performance, but it was the small details that really made it so memorable. The facial prosthetics used to give his Joker those iconic facial scars, being one example.
The origin of the lip-lick
Heath Ledger fully dedicated himself to crafting his Joker, famously holing up in a hotel room for a month and writing a "Joker diary." And once the late star had his performance locked down, it was time to develop his visual style. In Empire's oral history of "The Dark Knight," prosthetics supervisor Conor O'Sullivan spoke about how he designed Joker's facial appearance without any kind of creative brief, eventually settling on Chelsea smile-inspired facial scarring to represent the villain's chilling rictus.
The facial pieces O'Sullivan developed actually constituted what Ledger called a "new technology." Explaining that "the scars are made out of silicone not prosthetic," Ledger added that his "whole bottom lip [was] fake." Unfortunately, the new tech wasn't without its flaws.
In the documentary "I Am Heath Ledger" (via Far Out), it was revealed that the silicone pieces would sometimes come loose, prompting the actor to keep licking his lips to make sure they stayed in place. Eventually, Ledger embraced the licking and made it part of his character's mannerisms. And as any "Dark Knight" fan will remember, the resulting performance was full of lip-licking moments that ultimately added to the villain's overall creepiness.
Making the Joker feel real
There's a moment in "The Dark Knight" where Heath Ledger's Joker meets the mob for the first time and is told he's "crazy." He responds to this accusation with a brief "I'm not. No, I'm not." It's quiet, understated, and accompanied by this oddly unsettling mannerism, whereby Ledger kind of half blinks and just barely licks his lips. And there's just something about the way Ledger moves in that moment that caused it to remain in my memory ever since I first saw it. Which goes to the point of these small moments between his more grandiose antics making his performance what it was.
As Christopher Nolan put it in the Empire piece:
"What was incredible about the way [Ledger] played it is it's funny; he's created an iconic performance, but there's a vulnerability, there's something... there's depth to it [...] He just manages to make this guy real, and therefore, much more frightening, I think, because you can kind of believe in him, you can believe he could walk in the room and just start being particularly unpleasant."
The lip-licking was admittedly a very small part of that process of making the Joker feel real, but it's a significant one in the sense that it represents Ledger's attention to detail and adding the depth that Nolan recognized as so important. So, while Jack Nicholson may have thought he should have been the Joker in "The Dark Knight," we're pretty lucky Ledger was the one to take this character and imbue him with all the subtleties he did.