Showrunner Jonathan Nolan explains how the Oscar-winning performance influenced the show’s call sheet.
The Big Picture
- Heath Ledger’s iconic performance as The Joker in
The Dark Knight
influenced the casting in the
Fallout
series. - Jonathan Nolan credits the bold choice of casting Ledger in shaping Fallout’s creative team and their approach.
-
Fallout
, set in a post-apocalyptic LA, follows survivors in an alternate 1950s world ravaged by nuclear war.
Gone much too soon, celebrated actor Heath Ledger left behind him a treasure trove of incredible performances. Jumping from genre to genre, the actor both stole and broke the hearts of audiences around the world through his performances in films like 10 Things I Hate About You, A Knight’s Tale, Monster’s Ball, and Brokeback Mountain. And while he had to go to some seriously heavy places for many roles, like when he played the heroin-addicted Dan Carter in Candy, his part as The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight will forever go down as his most chaotically sinister character. It will also go down as one of the actor’s best performances of his career as he posthumously received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work and vision as the dangerous nutjob.
While answering questions at the Fallout FYC event, attended by Collider’s Therese Lacson, Jonathan Nolan, who co-wrote The Dark Knight alongside his brother and the movie’s director, Christopher Nolan, and served as a director and executive producer for Fallout, credited his sibling’s decision to give Ledger the seemingly out-of-character role for how the creative team behind Fallout lined up their call sheet. As Jonathan Nolan explained,
“I think I don’t know if I would have the guts to do it if we hadn’t gone through the experience on Batman. I think often about your casting Heath Ledger. And I’m not even sure how aware you were of it, because you’re not online, and I, at the time, was very online. We were very aware of the fact that
people thought, ‘Oh, they’ve blown it
,’ right? Because they couldn’t quite see it, it didn’t quite map onto their — he wasn’t Jack Nicholson, right? And I remember watching that I’d been terrified because we’d written the draft, and I was sort of thinking, ‘How’s it gonna work out?’ I think the answer was it worked out very, very well.”
An Adaptation Formed By Fans
It’s one thing to do a TV show or movie adaptation with the fandom in mind, but quite another to approach it as a fan. Nolan said this was key in crafting the story that played out during Season 1 of the hit Prime Video series. As he explained, the golden ticket was creating their own batch of characters and not fully leaning on those who players had already met in the sprawling series of video games.
“And that gave me the courage to sort of go okay, look, if you approach these things, not for the fans, but as a fan, find something that you love and try to
treat it with as much respect as you can
. And trust that respect and love will show through even if you have to, in this case, as you pointed out, you have to make choices. Here you are, taking and robbing the people who played the games of that experience. We had a huge advantage in that the nature of the franchise was different story, different characters. So we had this opportunity;
no one’s ever played as Lucy McLean before
, no one’s ever played as The Ghoul before. So that helps reframe the conversation.”
Season 1 of Fallout is now streaming in its entirety on Prime Video.
![Fallout TV Show New Poster](https://static1.colliderimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/fallout-tv-show-new-poster.png)
Fallout
In a future, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles brought about by nuclear decimation, citizens must live in underground bunkers to protect themselves from radiation, mutants and bandits.
- Release Date
- April 11, 2024
- Cast
- Moises Arias , Johnny Pemberton , Walton Goggins , Kyle MacLachlan
- Main Genre
- Sci-Fi
- Seasons
- 1
- Creator(s)
- Graham Wagner , Geneva Robertson-Dworet
- Producer
- Lisa Joy, Jonathan Nolan
- Streaming Service(s)
- Prime Video
Watch On Prime Video
This article was originally published on collider.com