10 Actors Who "Stole" Their Performances Off Real People

8. Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight

Who He Plays: The Joker Who He Really Plays: A young Tom Waits Continuing with the Batman villains inspired by real people theme, it's again true that Heath Ledger's Joker was the sum of intense preparation by an actor building the character from top to bottom. Stated influences included Sid Vicious and Malcolm McDowell's Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange. Which is all fine, until you watch this interview with Tom Waits and realise exactly where The Joker came from. Waits, heavy-lidded, eccentric, enormously charismatic, but with a menacing grin and a mischievous sense of dry humour, is such an obvious inspiration that you can see him in Ledger's every move in The Dark Knight. Of course, that 'unique' accent of The Joker's is where the comparison becomes impossible to deny; Ledger's voice as The Joker isn't an imitation, it's an uncanny rendition of the way Waits sounded as a younger man, a smoker's lazy California drawl adopted to perfection.