The Story Behind Mark Hamill's Casting as The Joker in BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES

Mark Hamill taking on the role of The Joker in Batman: The Animated Series was inspired casting. He was so great in that role and he gave us a very different and unique version of the villain that the fans loved. In a recent report from Vulture, we learn the story of how Hamill landed that role.

When they were auditioning actors for the role, Bruce Timm explained that everyone who came in to read was basically doing the Cesar Romero version of the character from the original 1960s Batman series. He explained that no one was treating the character seriously. Even Tim Curry came in to audition and even originally landed the role!

Timm said: “All of the actors that we tested were all doing these really silly and bizarre voices. None of it had any serious threat to it at all. Tim Curry actually came in and gave us something really close to what we wanted. It was funny and weird but also definitely had some menace to it. So we hired Tim. He did about three episodes for us. And then Alan Burnett came to me after we did the third one, and we listened to the assembled tracks, and he said, ‘I think we have to replace Tim.’”

Voice director Andrea Romano said that Timm just couldn’t “wrap his head around Tim’s performance. And the truth of it is, I never would have recast Tim.” She didn’t want to replace Tim because he’d already recorded several episodes and she didn’t want to deal with the hassle of re-recording them. She explains: “It’s not that Tim was doing anything bad, it just wasn’t quite what we wanted.”

Romano ended up getting a call from Hamill’s agent telling her that he was a huge fan of comic books and Batman and that he wanted to be involved with the series in some way.

Hamill shared his thoughts on that, saying: '“I actively wanted to get on this show because I was reading about the people that they were putting together in key positions. I followed the fan press in terms of comic books. I was reading in, I think, Comics Buyer’s Guide that their goals were to make the episodes of Batman analogous to the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons of the ’40s. That was their benchmark of quality. I thought, Oh, my gosh, they’re really going to do this right. It’s not going to be aimed at grade-school kids, like some earlier iterations of the Batman cartoons.”

So Romano brought Hamill in for a guest spot. He provided the voice of a corporate tycoon who was responsible for Mr. Freeze’s wife dying. He was not cast as Joker quite yet. Hamill said of the experience: “I went in and I just let my geek flag fly. I was asking them all these questions: ‘Are you going to do Ra’s al Ghul? Are you going to do Dr. Hugo Strange?’”

Romano said: “He was very grateful, and he pulled me aside at the end of the session and said, ‘I had so much fun doing this, and thank you so much for bringing me in. But I really want to be a part of the series. I don’t want to just come in and do a guest-star and disappear.’ And then, coincidentally, here comes the need to recast the Joker.”

Not long after Hamill got the call to come in and audition for The Joker, but it’s a role that he initially didn’t want because of the big shoes that he’d have to fill. He looked back on that, saying: “I got a call saying, ‘They want you to come in and audition for the Joker.’ And I said, ‘Oh, gosh, that’s a little too high-profile for my liking. Not only has it been done with Cesar Romero, but it’s been done by Jack Nicholson. What can I bring to the table that hasn’t been done before?’ I said, ‘I’d rather play Two-Face or Clayface or someone who hasn’t been done.’ The reason I went in was because I was absolutely certain that they would be unable to cast me as the Joker simply because, public-relations-wise, the idea of the guy who played Luke Skywalker — this icon of heroism, this virtuous character — playing this icon of villainy? Comic-book fans are notoriously demanding. They’re very opinionated and not shy about letting you know how they feel. I thought it would be a PR disaster that they would not be able to withstand. It gave me a great confidence, since I didn’t think there was any shot at all of me getting the part, so I had that performance anxiety removed.”

He obviously won everyone over! Paul Dini said: “I remember listening to his audition, and when he did the laugh, I said, ‘That’s it. That’s just it.’ The laugh was cruel, it was funny, there was an undercurrent of terrible sadness to it. It was a laugh from a destroyed soul.”

I love that description of the Joker’s laugh. When discussing how that nightmarish laugh came to be, Hamill explained: “I had done Mozart in Amadeus in the first national tour, and then they transferred me over to Broadway, and one of the things that is relevant to my audition [for the Joker] is that Mozart had this sort of ghastly laugh that threw everybody. I played with that laugh a lot. I’d do a little Dwight Frye, I’d do a little Sydney Greenstreet. I love all those old Warner Bros. movies, so I was just slipping people in. Sometimes I’d get notes like, ‘It was a little too ‘Jerry Lewis at the matinee’. Reel it back.’ I’m telling you this because, in retrospect, after getting the part, I asked Andrea Romano, ‘How did I get it? What was the process? How did you know that you wanted me?’ And she said, ‘The laugh.’ I didn’t want to get pigeonholed into a specific laugh. With the Joker, I said, This is like an artist with a very big palette. I want a range of laughs. One thing that stuck with me was, when Frank Gorshin was talking about the Riddler [whom Gorshin played in the 1960s series], I was reading about him and he said, ‘A lot of times, it’s not that the Riddler laughs, it’s what he laughs at.” I said, Oh, that’s interesting. If I can find places to open a little window into the psyche of this psycho, I’m going to use that.”

Kevin Conroy went on to talk about Hamill’s Joker, and said: "Luke Skywalker is the nice, young leading man, and most times in films, that’s probably the least interesting character in a film. Well, Mark Hamill could not be further from that. This madman came into the recording studio and he was totally eccentric and he goes a million miles an hour. He talks a million miles an hour. His imagination never stops jumping from topic to topic. He’s a very intellectually alive person, and if you get Mark on a topic, you can’t shut him up for an hour.”

Bruce Timm then added: “It was just like, Hallelujah! Who knew that Luke Skywalker would be our perfect Joker?”

To read about how Batman: The Animated Series came together, click here. To read about how Kevin Conroy was cast as Batman, click here.