The actor who died young at the age of 28, Heath Ledger self-imposed solitary confinement for a month so he could get into the Joker’s character for his film, The Dark Knight.
A few parts of his documentary show Heath’s father reading out excerpts from his personal diary when he locked himself in a room to prepare for a role.
The most spine-chilling thing about this diary is that the last page has a picture of Heath dressed as Joker from makeup rehearsal with ‘Bye-Bye’ written on the back of the page in silver.
The film was released 6 months after his death in his apartment due to overdose of prescribed medicines. Heath had major issues with sleep and keeping himself calm after he had worked on his roles in The Dark Knight and I’m not there.
Even his ex-wife had confirmed that Heath had trouble sleeping, “For as long as I’d known him, he had bouts with insomnia. He had too much energy. His mind was turning, turning, turning – always turning.” (wikipedia)
The scenes from the documentary shows his father talking about his son’s dedication to his roles in his various movies. He also talks about how funny his Heath looked as a nurse in the movie The Dark Knight because when he was young, he sister used to dress him up as a nurse.
Ledger took a lot of inspiration from Malcolm McDowell’s character of ‘Alex’ in Stanely Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange.’
You can watch the clip from the documentary here:
