Tangled Magazine

Eckhart faces his demons

Jamie Portman

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

It wasn’t the the most pleasant form of research, but Aaron Eckhart knew it was necessary.

In preparation for his role in The Dark Knight as Harvey Dent, the crusading Gotham district attorney who is transformed into the hideous and emotionally twisted Two-Face, Aaron started talking to burn victims.

“I saw what happened to the skin and the body, what happens psychologically to a burn victim . . . how they feel about themselves when people are looking at them. They feel monstrous and out of place.”

Even though it’s The Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger, who is responsible for Two-Face’s dreadful deformity, this once upright lawyer ends up finding a fatal kinship with the arch-villain who is terrorizing Gotham city. And this, says Eckhart, is another reason why Two-Face is one of the most fascinating and complex villains in the Batman canon.

Before shooting even started, director Chris Nolan had commissioned a sculpture showing what Eckhart would look like in the latter half of the movie, and the 40-year-old actor was stunned at the result.

“Some guy in England did a sculpture that Chris sent me. I wish I could remember his name — he did the most wonderful sculpture of the face . . . the tendons, the teeth — all that sort of thing.

“The eyeball is cool,” Eckhart adds. (Actually the eyeball is nightmare-inducing).

Then Eckhart decides he’s saying too much. “I will say that I would rather not talk too much about it because I want to let the audience come to it fresh.”

He enjoyed playing the role and working with the likes of Nolan, Ledger and Christian Bale, who plays Batman, and Maggie Gyllenhaal who is assistant district attorney Rachel Dawes. What he didn’t enjoy were the long hours in makeup.

“I was in early and left late. It was a process. I probably wouldn’t want to do a big makeup movie again.”

However, the fact that he was sharing the makeup trailer with Ledger lightened the boredom.

“It was a lot of fun because Heath brought in his iPod which had more songs than EMI. It was a lot of fun in that makeup trailer discovering our characters together.”

Nolan says he needed a compelling actor to play a compelling character like Harvey Dent, a.k.a. Two-Face. Nolan wanted “an all-American charm” at the beginning but he also needed a Harvey with “an edge: he had to suggest this undercurrent of anger and darkness . . . so that where he goes in the story is believable.”

Eckhart sees The Dark Knight as a morality play with an element of Shakespearean tragedy in the story of Two-Face.

“So much is going on in this comic-book movie,” he marvels.

“I felt when I read the script that Chris had tapped into what was going on today in the world. He tapped into some of the fears in the world. I thought that was important.”

Eckhart, who first made his mark playing predatory males in controversial films like Neil LaBute’s In The Company Of Men, accepted a role in The Dark Knight expecting that Harvey Dent would be very much of a subsidiary character. When he received the screenplay, he realized how wrong he was.

“I have to say I was astonished and stunned when I read it. I had heard that Heath was The Joker and I thought, ‘What is left for me to do?’ I could not believe how much Harvey is in it, and how long Harvey was in it before he became Two-Face. I thought that was brave of Chris.”

For Eckhart, the most memorable shooting day occurred with one of the film’s climactic scenes — where Ledger’s malevolent Joker visits the horribly maimed Harvey in hospital and the audience gets its first glimpse of the extent of Harvey’s injuries.

“That was Heath’s scene and he drove it . . . I really got a lot of energy from him, and throughout the day he would be finding his character.

“He would find different things to do . . . he would improvise and he would know his character so well that he could go anywhere at any time. That’s when you know you’re working with someone
special . . . ”

Source: Canada.com — The Calgary Herald