Was Jack Nicholson really terrible as Joker?
No. And a little history is important here as context. Prior to Nicholson, the only live action Joker we had was this guy:
A yukity yuk slapstick clown played by Cesar Romero who wouldn’t shave his mustache for the role in a campy, tongue in cheek tv show.
Then along came the Batman movie:
Everything changed. Batman was much darker, more serious and way more violent and he was pitted against a completely new interpretation of a character that no one had ever given much thought to.
Nicholson turned a jokey, sad villain into THE most popular bad guy in the superhero genre. He utterly redefined the modern Joker and everyone who has played the part since has built on his work. The Joker you know today is because of him.
This guy is scary.
Gone was the slapstick, the goofiness, the over the top hamming it up and cartoonishness of Romero’s character. In its place was a sense of menace and casual cruelty where over the top antics were deliberate and deadly.
Nicholson was the first actor to capture the essence of the Joker and cement the character in the mind of the audience. Everyone who has played the character since then has worked off of this template. Without Nicholson’s Joker, no one who has followed him would have even had the opportunity.
Those who see his performance for the first time decades later might be forgiven for not understanding how amazing it was at the time, but make no mistake, your favorite Joker owes everything to Jack Nicholson.
