‘Beyond Entertainment’ The Dark Knight’s Aaron Eckhart Name Drops Heath Ledger And Christopher Nolan While Explaining Why The Batman Flick Is Still So Beloved
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Although Heath Ledger’s Joker is frequently talked about when The Dark Knight, he wasn’t the only member of Bruce Wayne’s rogues gallery to appear in it. The Christopher Nolan-helmed feature, which ranks as both one of the best Batman movies and best movies of the 2000s, also chronicled Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent falling from grace and becoming Two-Face. So The Dark Knight is understandably one of the most well-known entries on Eckhart’s filmography, and the actor name-dropped Ledger and Nolan while recently explaining why this movie is so beloved, as well as described it as “beyond entertainment.”
Eckhart discussed The Dark Knight while talking about his new movie Chief of Station with Comicbook, and he started off by commending the script that Christopher Nolan wrote with his brother Jonathan, as well as threw in a quick compliment about Heath Ledger’s Academy Award-winning performance:
It was special in the script. It was special in the writing. I'll tell you a story about that. I was at home and a guy came to my house with the script. He handed me the script, and he waited outside for two hours while I read that script, and then I handed it back to him and he left. And I remember reading that script going, oh, I felt like I just read a novel, a good novel. And I thought, how in the world can you incorporate this many main characters into a plot, into a movie, into a script, and make it work? But there it is, and Chris put everything that was in that script up on the screen. And if you look at Gotham City and what's going on in Gotham City now, before that, Chris made that movie real. And of course you had Heath who just went off the charts.
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Taking place one year after the events of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight followed Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne dealing with a different kind of criminal in the form of The Joker, who wasn’t motivated by things like money, revenge or power, but simply wanted to cause chaos. As this battle between the unstoppable force and the immovable object unfolded, Harvey Dent, Gotham City’s district attorney, slowly descended into darkness and was pushed over the edge by the death of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Rachel Dawes and half his face being horrifically scarred. It’s like Harvey said, “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
Aaron Eckhart continued by talking about how the Gotham City Christopher Nolan and his cast and crew brought to life was so visceral, as this is a place so seeded in crime and corruption that only a vigilante dressed as a bat can steer things back in the right direction. In his words:
But look what happened. It's a big city that has feckless and cowardly politicians, corrupt politicians who have given that city over to a mafia. And now the people who cannot walk the streets at night cannot. They have to entrust themselves into somebody to come save them. And if you think about it, how pertinent and how relevant that storyline is, it's oppression. And so I think the movie lives beyond entertainment and cinema.
By the end of The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent/Two-Face was dead, but rather than let the public learn about how the district attorney killed five people and have his reputation be ruined, Batman agreed to take the fall for the murders, which ultimately led to him retiring from vigilantism for nearly a decade, as revealed in The Dark Knight Rises. While Eckhart’s Batman media experience was a one-and-done affair, it’s good to know that he still looks back fondly on the movie and considers it to be more than just a cinematic good time.
If you’re in the mood now to watch The Dark Knight, it can be streamed with a Max subscription alongside Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises. Otherwise, look ahead to the future with our upcoming DC movies guide.
