10 Overly Committed Actors Who Took Their Parts Way Too Seriously

2. Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight

"Why so serious?" The classic line delivered by the Joker in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight - and utilised to great effect in the movie's marketing campaign - might well have been applicable to the actor who played the part, Heath Ledger. Faced with the task of living up to Jack Nicholson's excellent performance in the same role in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman adaptation, Ledger threw himself into the character with a zeal few other actors have ever matched. That the end result of Heath Ledger's dedication to his performance as the Joker paid off isn't in any doubt - his twitching inflections and unique voice which veers effortlessly between menacing and bordering on the comical has already gone down in cinema history as one of the greatest screen villains of all time. His untimely death in the middle of filming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus only served to enhance its iconic status, with the sad realisation that we'd never get to see him inhabit the role again. Ledger's commitment to the role was more than apparent by his willingness to shut himself away in a hotel room for a month in order to study the character without disturbance while working on a detailed "Joker Diary". Describing the Joker as "psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy." it's not hard to imagine how getting into such a mindset had an adverse effect on Ledger's own state of mind. Some people, including his father Kim Ledger, believed at the time that it was his dedication to the darker aspects of the Joker which contributed to his death, but ultimately the truth may never be known.