From the not always clear past, Joker is portrayed on the big screen as a sadistic psychopath, but of great charisma. He is also a man with knowledge (chemical, computer, to name just a few) which is out of the ordinary. A creative and crazy man, the Joker represents absolute evil in cinema, the genius who is fighting to bring darkness instead of light into the world. This kind of character, however hateful, can only have a certain charm.
The Joker has always represented one of the characters coming from a comic book that is able to intrigue even those who have never been especially fond of the subject. This is because the character has become so deeply rooted in mass pop culture that he is immediately recognizable by anyone, as proven by the fact that, statistically, the vast majority of audiences who visited the theaters to watch Suicide Squad went to enjoy Jared Leto’s interpretation.
However, the Joker has had many faces over the years, and not just on paper, but also in movies and TV series. Therefore, this begs the question: what are the best versions of the character? We are going to explore in this ranking all the audiovisual interpretations of the Joker, to decide which one has been the most convincing. We remind you that, as always, like every ranking, this is strictly personal and we invite you to share yours in the comments section.
As controversial as it may seem to award the top spot to a version of the Joker that is so recent, to the extent that the film is being released in theaters today, this is actually pure meritocracy. While Nicholson and Ledger were great and the versions of the character they played were fantastic, Phoenix was able to revolutionize the concept of the Joker like never before.
If you were to think Ledger’s Joker was realistic, this is even more disturbing: a serial killer with severe psychiatric problems, a man who has endured so much abuse in his life that he now embraces a deeply disturbing nihilism. While Phoenix also played a Joker who has never come into contact with dangerous chemicals and wears makeup to “transform” himself, he is quite different from the one Nolan created more than a decade ago.
He is a Joker who doesn’t believe in anything, angry, dangerous, unpredictable: while many think he doesn’t have much of the comic book character that we all know, he is in fact very close to him and is a sensational version, troubled, human and yet almost demonic: in a nutshell, we are speaking of an unprecedented Joker, a real and welcome surprise.
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