Mark Hamill recalls his Joker audition forBatman: The Animated Seriesand confesses he thought he wasn’t going to get his now-iconicDCrole.Several actors have played the Joker in live-action, includingBatman’s Jack Nicholson,The Dark Knight’s Heath Ledger, andJoker’s Joaquin Phoenix. However, the Joker is now synonymous with Mark Hamill when the Clown Prince of Crime appears in animated form, whether it’s in 2D or 3D animated movies and shows, or video games.
In an episode of thePolitickinpodcast (viaiHeart), Mark Hamill recalls hisBatman: The Animated Seriesaudition.Hamill reveals that he believed hisStar Warsfame was going to be an obstacle, as Luke Skywalker is a very different character from the Joker. According to Hamill, this belief led him to attend the audition without high expectations, which in turn allowed him to have fun performing. Of course, the rest is history. Read Hamill’s full comments below:
“So I said… I’d love to audition, but I wanted to play a villain that had never been done before. ClayFace, Two Face, whatever. But they said, ‘you have an audition for the Joker.’ I said, ‘oh, it’s a little too high profile. Jack Nicholson was so great and Cesar Romero…’ Anyway, two months earlier they’d cast Michael Keaton as Batman, and all the fanboys lost their minds: ‘Oh my god, he’s Mr. Mom. He can’t be Batman, blah blah blah’ without seeing him play the part.
So what I’m saying in that atmosphere, I said, ‘if you think they lost their minds over Mr. Mom playing Batman, how are they gonna feel about Luke Skywalker playing the Joker?’ There’s no way they can cast me. So normally you go in and if you want the part a lot, sometimes your anxiety can get the better of you. They can sense a neediness that makes them uncomfortable. You’re off your game because your nerves or whatever.
Here, I thought, ‘well, since there’s no way I can get it… I’m gonna make them sorry they can’t hire me, and I just let it rip’ and had the greatest time in my life.”
How The Joker Revived Mark Hamill’s Career, In His Own Words
Voicing The Joker Opened New Doors For Mark Hamill
In the same episode of thePolitickinpodcast,Mark Hamill also explained how his Joker casting allowed him to dive deep into the world of voice acting. Hamill found the"voicover world"to be especially welcoming and full of talented people, and he liked the wide variety of roles he could take on regardless of his physical appearance or regular speaking voice. In Hamill’s words,“they cast with their ears, not their eyes.“Read Mark Hamill’s further comments below:
And what happened was, it really turned my career in the sense that it opened up doors in the voiceover world, and the voiceover world is one of the most talented subsets of show business. And everywhere you go, if you do your job and you’re on time, you’re not a prima donna. You get accepted by the Broadway community, the off Broadway community, and so forth.
So you know, once I started doing various parts other than the Joker, I was very quickly accepted by people that I admire
so much. And I don’t know, I’ve lost count of how many cartoons have done over one thousand since ninety-two, but yeah, they cast with their ears, not their eyes. So you’re going to be able to play characters that you would never get on camera.
And you know, I never got to do dialects until I did voiceover. Then I could do Australian, and I could do Cockney, I could do whatever, because unless you’re Meryl Streep, if they wanted an Australian, they’d hire an Australian.
Mark Hamill has voiced the Joker in several different DC projects, including theArkhamandLEGOvideo game franchises, multiple animated shows and movies, anda Joker cameo in theBirds of Preyshow, which featured a different actor on set but used Hamill’s voice. Besides the Joker, Mark Hamill has also voiced characters such as Chucky in 2019’sChild’s Playreboot, Skips inRegular Show, Ozai inAvatar: The Last Airbender, and Arnim Zola in multiple Marvel animated projects. Since his casting as Joker inBatman: The Animated Series, Mark Hamill has undeniably had a blast in the voice acting world.
Our Take On Hamill’s Batman: TAS Joker Comments
There’s Never A Single Ideal Actor For The Joker
Mark Hamill defied his own expectations and became one of the most beloved Joker actors sinceBatman: The Animated Series. However, his comments on fan expectations before his casting still ring true today. Over a decade after Hamill got the Joker role,Heath Ledger’s casting as the Joker in Christopher Nolan’sThe Dark Knightwas met with controversy. Another decade after Heath Ledger’s Joker became the new paragon of Joker performances,Joker’s standalone nature and lack of comic-accurate appearance also received criticism — only for Joaquin Phoenix to excel in the role. So,while Mark Hamill is widely regarded as the Joker’s unrivaled voice actor, there’s always the possibility that new actors will do a similarly great job.
