Was Heath Ledger Supposed to Be in The Dark Knight Rises?
Heath Ledger’s The Joker is considered one of the best villains of all time.
Unfortunately, Ledger never got to see the impact of his iconic performance. He died of an accidental drug overdose of prescription drugs at 28, six months before the release of The Dark Knight. The following year his family accepted his Best Supporting Actor award in his honor at the 2009 Academy Awards.
Ironically, The Joker survived The Dark Knight when Batman left him hanging of a building. The audience was left hanging too. Even after Ledger’s untimely passing, speculation about The Joker’s return in The Dark Knight Rises dogged director Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros.
The possibility of The Joker’s return in a third Dark Knight film had already been considered by screenwriter David Goyer back in 2005. A month before the release of Batman Begins, Goyer told Premiere magazine he wrote treatments for two more Dark Knight films both featuring The Joker.
“The next one would have Batman enlisting the aid of [Police Commissioner] Gordon and [Gotham District Attorney Harvey] Dent in bringing down The Joker…but not killing him. In the third, the Joker would go on trial, scarring Dent in the process.”
The then-unnamed sequel to Batman Begins would have finished with the capture of The Joker, and the third film would focus on Two-Face as the primary villain and The Joker in a supporting capacity.
Ultimately, the two plot lines would be rolled into one film, The Dark Knight, with the transformation of Dent (Aaron Eckhart) from Gotham’s White Knight attorney into Two-Face included as part of The Joker’s plan to destroy Batman’s image. The Joker does achieve his goal with Batman assuming the role of villain to keep Dent’s reputation intact and Gotham’s hope alive.
Combining both of Goyer’s treatments into one movie presumably happened early on in the development of The Dark Knight.
But with the survival of The Joker, the story was left open-ended for his return in The Dark Knight Rises.
Apart from Ledger’s death, Nolan had reservations about making a third film. He expressed concerns about the general poor quality of the third film in trilogies. But this would have either left his Batman series incomplete or worse, allowed another filmmaker to finish it and likely ruin it.
Nolan challenged Goyer to prove that a third film could be as good as the first two. But the dilemma remained: Would the Joker return? Who would play him? And which villain could replace The Joker if he didn’t return?
Nolan briefly considered recasting The Joker but decided against it out of respect for Ledger.
Warner Bros. wanted to play it safe by using two familiar villains for the final film. They suggested hiring Leonardo DiCaprio as The Riddler and Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Penguin.
DiCaprio was a safe choice considering his star status and involvement in another Nolan project, Inception, which was in the middle of production at the time. The idea of reuniting the star and director of Dark Knight 3 seemed like a marketing boon.
But Nolan quickly rejected the idea. He didn’t want another villain with a similar persona to The Joker. Instead, Nolan decided on Bane (Tom Hardy), a villain with an ideology diametrically opposed to The Joker and unfamiliar to most of the general audience, apart from readers of DC Comics.
Since the release of The Dark Knight Rises, there has been internet chatter about Nolan’s plan to bring Ledger’s Joker back in the third film through a combination of unused footage and CGI. But the director has denied this.
However, both Ledger’s sister, Kate, and Aaron Eckhart, who played Two-Face, confirmed that plans for Heath Ledger’s return in the third film as The Joker were made before his untimely death. In 2008, Eckhart stated that while he only signed for one film, “Heath was supposed to go on.”
Then in 2017, Ledger’s sister confirmed during the promotional tour for the documentary I Am Heath Ledger, that “he was so proud of what he had done in Batman. And I know he had plans for another.”
