Barry Keoghan's Joker breaks a DC movie record with his brief appearance in The Batman, surpassing Heath Ledger, Joaquin Phoenix, and Jared Leto.
Summary
- Barry Keoghan's brief role in The Batman broke the record for longest Joker makeup process in a DC movie, surpassing previous DC actors Heath Ledger, Joaquin Phoenix, and Jared Leto.
- Keoghan's Joker makeup process initially took six hours, but it was later shortened to five.
- In comparison, it took Jared Leto three hours, Heath Ledger 30 minutes, and Joaquin Phoenix only 15 minutes to have their respective Joker makeup applied.
Barry Keoghan breaks a Joker record after his brief The Batman appearance, surpassing previous DC actors like Heath Ledger, Joaquin Phoenix, and Jared Leto. While Matt Reeves' The Batman featured multiple antagonists throughout its 3-hour runtime, the Joker only made a brief appearance towards The Batman's ending, and he was obscured by shadows. However, The Batman's deleted scenes revealed what Barry Keoghan's Joker looks like in this DC universe, his heavily scarred face and disheveled hair diverging from previous live-action iterations of the character on the big screen.
Although Barry Keoghan's role in The Batman is short, his make-up process has been the longest for a Joker actor. Talking to GQ about his filmography, Keoghan reveals that it initially took six hours to apply his Joker makeup, and that the process was shortened to five hours. In a 2016 interview with THR, makeup artist John Caglione Jr. states that Heath Ledger's Joker makeup application for The Dark Knight was cut from one hour to 30 minutes, and Suicide Squad makeup artist Alessandro Bertolazzi explains that Jared Leto's makeup took three hours. According to Joker makeup artist Nicki Ledermann (via Business Insider), it only took 15 minutes for Joaquin Phoenix to be camera-ready.
Why Barry Keoghan's Joker Look Is So Complex
The reason behind the six hours of makeup application Barry Keoghan's Joker transformation required is evident in The Batman's deleted scene. Keoghan's Joker sports an extremely scarred face, with a contorted mouth, crooked teeth, wrinkled cheeks, sunken eyes, and irregular bald spots. This level of detail surpasses Jack Nicholson's Joker make-up for Tim Burton's Batman, which also required prosthetic work, but didn't reach the elaborate irregularity of the Joker's face in The Batman. To achieve it, The Batman's make-up team must have needed to design and apply multiple layers of make-up, custom prosthetic pieces, custom dentures, and a detailed wig over a bald cap for the Joker's oddly balding head.
In a 2022 interview with Variety, The Batman director Matt Reeves explained Barry Keoghan's Joker origin story, revealing that the villain owes his unique look to a congenital condition, as opposed to an accident or a different kind of injury. Reeves drew inspiration from The Phantom of the Opera, as well as from Conrad Veidt’s titular character in the 1928 silent film “The Man Who Laughs”. According to Reeves,
"He has a congenital disease where he can’t stop smiling and it’s horrific. (...) It’s not about some version where he falls into a vat of chemicals and his face is distorted, or what [Christopher] Nolan did, where there’s some mystery to how he got these scars carved into his face. What if this guy from birth had this disease and he was cursed? He had this smile that people stared at that was grotesque and terrifying. Even as a child, people looked at him with horror, and his response was to say, ‘Okay, so a joke was played on me,’ and this was his nihilistic take on the world.”
Barry Keoghan's 1 Joker Rule Made His The Batman Villain Even Better
Barry Keoghan had one rule for his version of the Joker in Matt Reeves' The Batman, and it makes his villain even better – here's why and what it is.Barry Keoghan's Joker was one of the biggest surprises in The Batman, and his portrayal of the character was received positively by audiences. Keoghan himself found the Joker's positive reactions amusing due to how little screentime he had in The Batman. While not as popular as Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix's Jokers, Keoghan's appearance in The Batman's deleted scenes was enough to raise anticipation for a bigger role in a future sequel. Given The Batman's critical and commercial success, and considering the high quality of its make-up — which also made Colin Farrell recognizable as the Penguin — Barry Keoghan's future as the Joker in future The Batman installments seems promising.
Source: GQ, THR, Business Insider, Variety
