Take a Look Inside Heath Ledger’s Creepy Dark Knight Diary

Good news, America! You do not have a monopoly on morbid, celebrity-obsessed reality television! There’s apparently a show called Too Young to Die in Germany, and it did an episode on Heath Ledger, because sometimes you just need to watch something that makes you feel creepy and sad. Here’s some footage of the diary Ledger kept while he locked himself in a hotel room in preparation for the Dark Knight shoot. It’s filled with pictures of clowns and screen shots from A Clockwork Orange and the words “BYE BYE” written over the last page, and it will make you question whether Ledger’s posthumously award-winning performance as the Joker was actually worth this self-torture. Best part of the video? When it’s over and all the suggested videos of angry teenage boys doing their own Joker makeup come up on the screen.

Here’s the translation from the French voice-over, off the YouTube clip:

This is the Joker’s diary. In order to inhabit his character, he locked himself up in a hotel room for weeks. He would do that. He liked to dive into his characters, but this time he really took it up a notch.

The hospital scene is interesting because when he was a kid, his sister Kate liked to dress him up as a nurse. He was really funny like that. He also was in the movie. This is a makeup test which was done eight months before. Before the end of the shooting he wrote “bye bye” on the back of the page. It was hard to see this.

Filed Under: The Dark Knight