10 Actors Who Were Scared Of Other Actors

2. ...And Maggie Gyllenhaal Couldn't Even Look At Him

The Joker Rachel Dawes
Warner Bros.

Michael Caine and Maggie Gyllenhaal don't have much screen time with Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight - Gyllenhaal has a single scene and Caine has a single quick moment - but he clearly left one hell of an impact on them regardless.

Gyllenhaal's Rachel Dawes was terrorised by Joker during the movie's penthouse party scene, with the villain pulling a knife to her face and telling her a (fake) story about how he got his scars. It's an intense conversation, with Rachel writhing and trying to escape his grasp, while also struggling to maintain eye contact with him.

In the past, Gyllenhaal has confessed to finding her scene with Ledger "scary", and apparently, the moment where Rachel is first grabbed by Joker and tries to wriggle out of his clutches was semi-improvised: Gyllenhaal was legitimately uneasy and found it hard to look Ledger in the eye, prompting him to say his "look at me" line on the spot.

The duo's acting in this scene resulted in one of the tensest moments in the movie, and clearly, Ledger was just as powerful a presence in person as he is on the screen.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!