2. Casey Affleck
The man the thought of whose casting inspired this article, Casey Affleck is still, sadly, best known as the younger brother of two-time Oscar winner Ben. Unlike Ben, though, who's picked up plenty of Golden Raspberry's along the way, Casey's film career is more or less unblemished. From a walk-on role in Good Will Hunting all the way back in 1997 to being a member of Ocean's Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen, he only really came into his own in The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford, the strength of his performance in which merited his inclusion on this list. Unlike with the previous actors, the photo above is of Affleck in character as the eponymous Ford. There's something immediately unsettling about him: it could be the queasy grin or the strange half squint, but - as the notorious coward who lavished hero worship on outlaw James before shooting him dead - there's a definite sense of wrongness to him. While director Andrew Dominik attributed his success in the role to Casey's knowing what it's like to live in someone's shadow - true but ouch - it's a better performance, I'd argue, than Javier Bardem's in No Country for Old Men, which swept the awards the same year. Bardem's implacable Chigurgh may be bone chilling, but it's not half as dark a reflection on humanity as Affleck's craven Ford. Since then, Casey's appeared as a do-good Boston PI in his brother's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, and a sociopathic small-town sheriff in Michael Winterbottom's widely panned The Killer Inside Me, as well as directing brother-in-law Joaquin Phoenix in mockumentary I'm Still Here (which documented the Gladiator actor's supposed breakdown). Though Casey's booked up in 2014 with Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, he's exactly the caliber of actor the Batman franchise needs, still enough of an unknown that he doesn't overwhelm the role Nicholson-style but big enough to have that recognition factor. If you thought Robert Ford made him seem a little too much of a nebbish for the Clown Prince of Crime - always on the edge of breaking out in the giggles - here's a clip from Killer Inside Me that might make you change your mind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inDXS8n9dX4
Shades of American Psychopath aside, Casey Affleck has the knack of being incredibly expressive without doing very much at all - that keen stare, that slight tilt of the head, he, like Ledger, could believably find The Joker in the stillness. A more subdued, perhaps less immediately charismatic performer, Casey could not only capture The Joker's darkness but the damage that lies at the heart of him: whether or not you go in for origin stories, this is a being born of a terrible trauma - much like Batman himself, the immoveable object to his unstoppable force. Given that character canonically spends much of his time locked up in Arkham between crime sprees, a Casey Joker might work well behind bars, a Hannibal Lecter figure. While he may not necessarily have the range of some of the actors in his list, Casey seems born to play this role (well, failing that The Riddler).