Jonathan Major loves Heath Ledger’s Joker: ‘He’s beautiful’

Fifteen years after his death, Heath Ledger’s legacy lives on in a new generation of actors, including Jonathan Majors.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly published Tuesday, the ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ star credited Ledger’s Oscar-winning performance as the Joker with sparking his passion for acting at a young age. Ledger portrayed the chaotic Batman villain in 2008’s The Dark Knight just before he died of a drug overdose at the age of 28.

“OK, first of all, he’s beautiful,” Majors said of his experience watching Ledger on screen.

“He’s got this f… jawline, and he didn’t budge. He threw his body around. He was so full. And I said, ‘This is what I’m coming for. I’m inspired.’ It takes a lot, do you feel me? be inspired.”

Majors added that he recognized and appreciated the nuance Ledger brought to embody one of pop culture’s most notorious antagonists of all time.

“The way I grew up, the people I grew up with, drug dealers, killers, killers, everyone just got out of prison. Everyone wore an ankle monitor. So I knew the complexity of the guys I grew up with,” he said. “Yes, you did that, but you did that too. And what I saw in Heath and everything he did was, It’s this and that.”

This isn’t the first time Majors, who recently wowed audiences at Sundance with his performance in the movie Magazine Dreams, has poked fun at The Dark Knight. In December, the 33-year-old actor wrote an essay for Variety about first seeing the film at a midnight screening in Texas with his “high school sweetheart and her very, very cool dad.”

“Have you noticed that the eyes of Christian Bale’s Batman and Ledger’s Joker are painted similarly, blackened by what appears to be the oil and coal love child, as if these two men, as different as they may appear, saw the same things have and maybe see them the same way?” He wrote for Variety.

“This moral theme and reasoning runs throughout the picture. What is right and what is wrong? My 18-year-old self sat in the movies long after the credits rolled, stunned by a beauty and complexity of humanity hitherto unknown in cinema and, dare I say, in my own existence.”

When the popular Marvel series Loki premiered in June 2021, Majors followed in Ledger’s footsteps and debuted his own supervillain, Kang the Conqueror. Majors will reprise the nefarious role in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which hits theaters February 17.

“There’s pressure and all the support,” he told EW of his introduction to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

“Out of [president of Marvel Studios Kevin] cowardly to [producer Stephen] Broussard to Tom Hiddleston, [who] every now and then just texts me, ‘What’s up?’ That was great.”