The Amateur’s Rami Malek on How Heath Ledger’s Joker Influenced His Character

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The Amateur’s Rami Malek on How Heath Ledger’s Joker Influenced His Character

Rami Malek explained how Heath Ledger‘s Joker from The Dark Knight inspired his performance during a key scene with an explosion in his new action film, The Amateur.

How did Heath Ledger’s Joker influence Rami Malek in The Amateur?

Malek plays Charlie Heller, a CIA cryptographer who transforms into a vigilante after terrorists kill his wife. Charlie is not a trained killer, so he uses his intelligence and ingenuity to exact revenge against those who wronged him.

In the trailer, Heller is seen walking away from an explosion. When the bomb goes off, Heller flinches, highlighting his amateurism as a field agent. Malek’s deliberate decision to flinch was inspired by the famous hospital explosion scene involving Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight.

“Looking at those moments from an acting perspective, I always thought, ‘How does an actor physically go about doing that on the day when something is practically exploding behind them? It feels like a near impossible task to just walk away from it,'” Malek told The Hollywood Reporter. “I then thought about how you would train to do something like that, and then I thought about Nolan’s films doing everything practically, in camera. So, yeah, if someone like the Joker is going to flinch, the authenticity that it gave to that moment lasted with me.”

Many iconic action heroes are stoic in these explosion scenes, but Malek wanted to represent the “antithesis” of that feeling in this particular scene.

“I thought about the antithesis of that and what would make people laugh,” Malek explained. “There’s an absurdity in the flinch, in a way, because it is so unlikely. It makes so much sense, and that’s the authenticity that we tried to invert into every aspect of this story.”

The Amateur also stars Rachel Brosnahan, Caitríona Balfe, Jon Bernthal, Michael Stuhlbarg, Holt McCallany, Julianne Nicholson, Adrian Martinez, Danny Sapani, and Laurence Fishburne.

Directed by James Hawes, The Amateur opens in theaters on April 11.