Michael Caine remembers being ‘floored’ by Heath Ledger in ‘The Dark Knight’

Michael Caine is recalling his time working with Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight.

The Sleuth star writes about acting alongside the Brokeback Mountain actor, who died before The Dark Knight‘s release in 2008, in his new memoir Don’t Look Back, You’ll Trip Over. “He was a lovely guy, very gentle and unassuming,” Caine writes of Ledger. “I wondered how he was going to play the Joker, especially as Jack Nicholson’s take had been so iconic. Brilliantly, Heath ramped up the character’s psychotic side rather than going for one-liners. His Joker was deeply, deeply warped and damaged, though you never find out exactly why, or what he’s really looking for.”

Caine thinks that one of his most iconic lines as Bruce Wayne’s butler, Alfred Pennyworth, aptly sums up Ledger’s take on the clown prince of crime. “As Alfred says to Bruce, ‘Some men just want to watch the world burn,'” Caine says. “And that was Heath’s version of the character: the smeared make-up, the weird hair, the strange voice. It was chilling. Absolutely floored me the first time I saw him in action — I was terrified!”

The Get Carter star clarifies that he wasn’t scared of Ledger himself, though, as his personality was completely different from the Joker. “He and Christian [Bale] were good friends and always having fun together. And then he was transformed into this scheming monster, driving a whole city towards mayhem,” Caine writes. “Looking back, I think Heath’s excellence made all of us raise our game. The psychological battle between the Joker and Batman is completely riveting. Are they in any way the same? What nudges one man to do good, and the other to do evil? The Joker wants to torment Bruce by convincing him that they’re two of a kind.”

Caine also remembers that “it was absolutely awful” when Ledger died at age 27 from an accidental overdose in January 2008. “It still makes me sad to think of it, more than fifteen years on,” he writes. “An accidental overdose, just tragic. Heath was only twenty-eight when he passed away. I hadn’t even made Zulu when I was that age. You think of what he might have gone on to achieve, it’s just heart-breaking.”

The actor notes that his costar’s death understandably changed the mood of film’s press circuit. “We were all terribly shocked, and it made doing the publicity for The Dark Knight that summer much more intense, because all the journalists wanted to talk about his death,” Caine writes. “I was so pleased when he was awarded the posthumous Oscar, because it must have been at least some sort of comfort for his poor family.”

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Caine says that the Dark Knight cast and crew were pulling for Ledger to win an Oscar while they were witnessing his performance on set. “The truth is, we’d all hoped he would win an Academy Award and thought he should, even while we were still filming the movie,” he writes. “So it was just a very sad thing that he wasn’t around to accept it in person. It’s a performance for the ages, and even though his career was cut short so soon, he’ll be remembered as a great actor, I believe.”

Don’t Look Back, You’ll Trip Over is on shelves now.