Reposted by Fellow Human
Fellow Human
@fellowhuman.bsky.social
57 followers 45 following 126 posts
I am a fellow human! Definitely made of meat. Canadian, she/her, approaching 50. I enjoy video games, gardening, buying craft supplies and not using them, and not washing the dishes. I have been an avid consumer of fic and such from MDZS etc.
![BT: Everybody who came in to audition for the Joker was doing, basically, [Adam West–era Joker actor] Cesar Romero. They weren’t treating the character seriously. All of the actors that we tested were all doing these really silly and bizarre voices. None of it had any serious threat to it at all. Tim Curry actually came in and gave us something really close to what we wanted. It was funny and weird but also definitely had some menace to it. So we hired Tim. He did about three episodes for us. And then Alan Burnett came to me after we did the third one, and we listened to the assembled tracks, and he said, “I think we have to replace Tim.”
AR: He just couldn’t wrap his head around Tim’s performance. And the truth of it is, I never would have recast Tim.
BT: I didn’t want to do it because we had already recorded a bunch of episodes with him and I knew we would have to rerecord them in post, which I knew was going to be a nightmare. But it didn’t take much for him to convince me, because I was kind of leaning that way myself. It’s not that Tim was doing anything bad, it just wasn’t quite what we wanted.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:474ldquxwzrlcvjhhbbk2wte/bafkreicp7nlfegzs6i2hjxdk5qwnt7wcnszrm4ojuo7o7sghjenzgrn724)
![MH: I got a call saying, “They want you to come in and audition for the Joker.” And I said, “Oh, gosh, that’s a little too high-profile for my liking. Not only has it been done with Cesar Romero, but it’s been done by Jack Nicholson. What can I bring to the table that hasn’t been done before?” I said, “I’d rather play Two-Face or Clayface or someone who hasn’t been done.” The reason I went in was because I was absolutely certain that they would be unable to cast me as the Joker simply because, public-relations-wise, the idea of the guy who played Luke Skywalker — this icon of heroism, this virtuous character — playing this icon of villainy? Comic-book fans are notoriously demanding. They’re very opinionated and not shy about letting you know how they feel. I thought it would be a PR disaster that they would not be able to withstand. It gave me a great confidence, since I didn’t think there was any shot at all of me getting the part, so I had that performance anxiety removed.
PD: I remember listening to his audition, and when he did the laugh, I said, “That’s it. That’s just it.” The laugh was cruel, it was funny, there was an undercurrent of terrible sadness to it. It was a laugh from a destroyed soul.
MH: I had done Mozart in Amadeus in the first national tour, and then they transferred me over to Broadway, and one of the things that is relevant to my audition [for the Joker] is that Mozart had this sort of ghastly laugh that threw everybody. I played with that laugh a lot. I’d do a little Dwight Frye, I’d do a little Sydney Greenstreet. I love all those old Warner Bros. movies, so I was just slipping people in. Sometimes I’d get notes like, “It was a little too ‘Jerry Lewis at the matinee’. Reel it back.” I’m telling you this because, in retrospect, after getting the part, I asked Andrea Romano, “How did I get it? What was the process? How did you know that you wanted me?” And she said, “The laugh.” I didn’t want to get pigeonholed into a specific laugh. With the…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:474ldquxwzrlcvjhhbbk2wte/bafkreihpixqca4m27sihmd2hfhimpnfxajk43vpzhozrncbjllbwofuzxa)
