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THE
trailers for The Dark Knight have shown quite a
bit of Heath Ledger’s scabbier, surlier reinvention of
the Joker (think of Malcolm McDowell’s thug from A
Clockwork Orange but with kelp-colored hair, scars
and a hyena laugh), but the producers have been keeping
the film’s other Batman bad guy, Two-Face, under wraps.
“That’s right, people don’t really know yet,” actor
Aaron Eckhart said with grin. “I can tell you that,
basically, when you look at Two-Face, you should get
sick to your stomach. Being the guy under all that,
well, that was a lot of fun for me. It’s like you would
feel if you met someone whose face had pretty much been
ripped off or burned off with acid. I can’t talk about
it beyond that because I don’t want to give away too
much of the plans by Chris.”
Chris is
Christopher Nolan, the director of Batman Begins,
the acclaimed 2005 franchise reboot, and of The Dark
Knight, the sequel that hits theaters July 18 with a
tale that looks far darker and more psychological than
the other, sunnier superhero fare this summer. The
darkness goes beyond the screen as well; 28-year-old
Ledger died in January in
New York
after an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.
GOOD GUY DOING BAD THINGS.
Eckhart plays Harvey Dent, a.k.a. Two-Face, in the
highly anticipated
The Dark Knight,
the sequel to the blockbuster
Batman Begins.
The
death of Ledger and the word of his incendiary
performance in this film have made him the natural focus
of early media coverage of The Dark Knight. But
Nolan told the Los Angeles Times this year that the
foundation of the film is the tale and transformation of
Eckhart’s character, Harvey Dent, from a crusading
Gotham City prosecutor to Harvey Two-Face, a maniac
whose face is ravaged on one side by a horrible injury.
On the
campy 1960s Batman television series, the writers
imported pretty much every major villain from the
namesake comic book—the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin
and Catwoman, etc.—but not Two-Face. He was simply too
gross. In the comic books, the wounds come from a splash
of acid thrown at the attorney by a gangster on the
witness stand, but there are hints that in this film it
might be the Joker, who is responsible for the scars.
Eckhart
won’t discuss that, but he did say that the wounds are
structurally deeper than in the comics: “There are fans
on the Internet who have done artist’s versions of what
they think it will look like, and I can tell you this:
They’re thinking small; Chris is going way farther than
people think.”
There
were plenty of name actors lined up hoping to get the
role of Two-Face, but in the end Nolan went with Eckhart
because of his “complexity and this aura he has of a
good man pushed too far,” Nolan said. Two-Face in the
film is more of a vigilante hunting down the Joker than
he is a criminal, as he has most often been portrayed in
the comics. His trademark is flipping a two-headed coin,
one side defaced, the other pristine, and letting its
landing determine his actions, often in situations where
he has a gun to someone’s head.
“The
difference between Batman and Two-Face is how far they
are willing to go and how they make their point,”
Eckhart said. “Otherwise, we’re talking about vigilante
crime-fighting. That’s what Batman is all about. He has
a strong sense of justice. And Harvey Dent has an
extremely strong sense of justice. His fiancée is
killed. He’s horribly injured. But he is still true to
himself. He’s a crime fighter, he’s not killing good
people. He’s not a bad guy, not purely.”
The
40-year-old, square-jawed Eckhart has a history of
playing authority figures pulled away from the bright
path. He was a cop on a path to destruction in The
Black Dahlia, the slick tobacco lobbyist in Thank
You for Smoking, the junior executive looking to
punish women in Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men,
all of them roles in which bad deeds are simple to see
but bad men are hard to recognize.
“You
look at a good guy too long and it’s not that exciting,
it’s the Boy Scout always doing the right thing,”
Eckhart said. “I’m interested in good guys gone wrong.
They’re not the bad guy, they’re the good guy doing bad
things.”
He joins
a franchise with a deep roster of serious actors
onboard: The Dark Knight has career-surging
Christian Bale back in the cape and Gary Oldman as
Gotham’s only
honest cop, Jim Gordon, as well as Oscar winners Michael
Caine and Morgan Freeman. Maggie Gyllenhaal steps in for
Katie Holmes as prosecutor Rachel Dawes, the romantic
interest of Bruce Wayne.
“My guy
identifies with everybody in the movie,” Eckhart said.
“Really, all of it is more than an adventure tale, it’s
somewhat of a mirror of our times. It deals with some
fundamental questions of what’s going on in society. To
me, this film is about how Batman feels about justice,
how he takes care of the city, how he feels about the
Joker when he meets him and sees what he is capable of
doing. How he feels when Harvey Two-Face takes matters
into his own hands. It’s not simple, and it gets ugly. I
think people will be surprised.” |
