Tim Curry Was the Joker — Until Mark Hamill Was

Tim Curry wasn’t simply considered for the Joker. He didn’t lose the role after an audition, and he didn’t record a few test lines that Warner Bros. decided not to use. Tim Curry was the Joker. He had the job, he recorded multiple episodes, and production had gotten far enough along that when Mark Hamill replaced him, Hamill had to record dialogue to animation that had already been timed around Curry’s performance.

TIM CURRY GOT THERE FIRST

When Batman: The Animated Series was being developed in the early 1990s, the people making it were already pushing against what a Saturday-morning superhero cartoon was supposed to look and sound like. The backgrounds were dark, the stories took Batman seriously, and the villains weren’t treated like jokes. Kevin Conroy gave Bruce Wayne and Batman two distinct voices, something that would become one of the defining choices of the character for an entire generation.

When it came time to cast the Joker, they hired Tim Curry, which makes a ridiculous amount of sense. By then Curry had already spent years proving he could walk the line between funny, theatrical, strange and absolutely terrifying. His résumé already included wildly different roles, from the flamboyant Frank-N-Furter and sinister Darkness to the comic Wadsworth and terrifying Pennywise, yet none of them felt like repetitions of the same performance.

Producer Eric Radomski later described Curry as having exactly the kind of theatrical presence they wanted for Joker. They weren’t looking for a goofy cartoon clown. They wanted the darkness underneath the joke, and that part always seemed to come very naturally to Curry.

So they recorded him, and they kept recording him as you do with voice actors. Exactly how many episodes Curry completed has become one of those details where everyone involved seems to remember it a little differently. Bruce Timm has spoken about several performances being recorded, while Mark Hamill has said Curry had already done at least four episodes and possibly as many as six by the time Hamill came in.

What we know for certain is that this went well beyond an audition. Kevin Conroy worked with Curry, directors worked with Curry, and episodes went into production with Curry’s performance already in place. But then something changed.

SO WHY WAS HE REPLACED?

Now this is where the story gets messy. For years, the common explanation was that Curry’s Joker was simply too frightening, and Kevin Conroy certainly remembered him that way.

Conroy later described Curry’s Joker as dark and genuinely scary. What Mark Hamill eventually brought to the character, according to Conroy, was something slightly different. Hamill was still dangerous, still insane and still capable of being terrifying, but he was also funny.

Curry gave them a Joker who felt like somebody you should actually run away from. Hamill gave them somebody who could make you laugh and then immediately remind you that laughing around him was probably a very bad idea.

Kent Butterworth, who directed “Christmas with the Joker,” similarly remembered Curry’s version as slower and more laid-back than what Hamill ultimately created. The series itself was still finding its tone at that point, and Joker was one of the characters they were still figuring out.

Curry, however, gave a completely different explanation for why he lost the role. At Fan Expo Canada in 2017, he was asked about being replaced and said he had bronchitis, was fired and was replaced by Mark Hamill.

The problem is that the production accounts and Curry’s account don’t line up perfectly. Bruce Timm has said the creative team made the difficult decision to replace Curry. Other people involved have described questions about the performance itself, while Curry said he became sick and lost the job.

There’s no reason to turn one version into absolute fact when the people who were actually there have given different accounts of what happened. The safest conclusion is also probably the most realistic one: the production was evaluating what it wanted from Joker, Curry became ill during that period, and the role was ultimately recast.

However it happened, Tim Curry was out, and the guy waiting behind him happened to be Mark Hamill.

LUKE SKYWALKER WANTED A REAL BATMAN VILLAIN

Hamill had already appeared on Batman: The Animated Series before becoming the Joker. He voiced corrupt businessman Ferris Boyle in “Heart of Ice,” the Mr. Freeze episode that became one of the defining and best installments of the entire series.

Hamill was also a huge comic-book fan. According to Bruce Timm, Hamill made it very clear that he wanted to play one of Batman’s major villains. He specifically mentioned Joker, only to be told that Tim Curry already had the role.

Hamill basically told them to call him if something else opened up, and then Curry was let go. They called, Hamill auditioned, and that was pretty much the end of the search.

Kevin Conroy remembered hearing Hamill’s Joker laugh and immediately realizing they had found their guy. That laugh would eventually become one of the most recognizable sounds attached to the character, but Hamill’s earliest episodes weren’t recorded the way most of the series was.

That was because Tim Curry had already done them.

MARK HAMILL HAD TO FOLLOW TIM CURRY’S PERFORMANCE

This might be my favorite part of the entire story because it shows just how far Curry’s version had actually gotten. Animation takes time, and voice recordings are usually completed early because animators need those performances to build scenes around them.

Curry had already recorded Joker dialogue before he was replaced, which meant some animation had already been created using Curry’s timing. When Hamill came in, he couldn’t simply stand beside Kevin Conroy and the rest of the cast and reinvent every line however he wanted.

For those early episodes, Hamill was effectively dubbing Joker. He has explained that the character’s mouth movements were already animated, meaning he had to fit his performance into timing established by another actor whose approach to the Joker was very different from his own.

Think about what that means. One of the most famous Joker performances ever recorded began with Mark Hamill having to work inside Tim Curry’s performance.

That doesn’t take anything away from Hamill. If anything, it makes what he accomplished even more impressive. It also means Curry left fingerprints on those early Joker episodes even though his voice was removed from them.

AND YES, YOU CAN ACTUALLY HEAR HIM

For years, Curry’s Joker became one of those legendary pieces of lost pop-culture history. People knew it happened and cast and crew members talked about it, but the finished show belonged so completely to Mark Hamill that it became difficult to imagine anybody else coming out of that animated face.

Eventually, portions of Curry’s recordings surfaced through documentary material and archival clips. Once you hear him, you understand exactly what everyone was talking about. It is unmistakably Tim Curry, but he isn’t simply recycling Pennywise, Darkness or one of his other famous characters. There is a weight to the performance, and he sounds genuinely sinister.

There’s less of the elastic lunacy Hamill eventually brought to the role and more of a feeling that this guy might genuinely kill somebody because the thought occurred to him five seconds ago. Hamill’s Joker moves constantly between tones. The pitch changes, the laugh changes, and he can go from childish to homicidal and back again in the same conversation.

Curry feels more like somebody inviting you into a room you probably shouldn’t enter. Neither interpretation is wrong; they’re simply completely different Jokers.

THE BIGGEST BATMAN VOICE-ACTOR WHAT IF?

Mark Hamill became the Joker for generations of Batman fans including me, and not just in Batman: The Animated Series. He carried the character through the larger DC Animated Universe, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, later animated projects and eventually the Arkham video games.

For a huge portion of the audience, you can put a Joker comic panel in front of them and Hamill’s voice is the one they hear when they read it. There’s no argument from me about whether he deserved that legacy. He absolutely did.

What fascinates me is how close we came to something completely different. Imagine Tim Curry staying with the series and developing that Batman/Joker relationship with Kevin Conroy over years. Imagine Mask of the Phantasm with Curry performing the Joker scenes, or that same Joker eventually appearing opposite Batman throughout the later animated shows.

Then remember what Curry could do with a character when somebody gave him permission to get weird.

That alternate version of Batman: The Animated Series isn’t some hypothetical casting sheet sitting in a Warner Bros. filing cabinet. For a brief period, it existed. Tim Curry recorded it, people performed opposite him, and animators worked from it.

Somewhere between those sessions and the episodes reaching television, one Joker disappeared and another took his place. We got Mark Hamill, and it would be ridiculous to complain about how that turned out.

Knowing that somewhere underneath the beginning of that legendary performance is the ghost of Tim Curry’s Joker makes those early episodes a lot more interesting to watch. Tim Curry didn’t almost become the Joker. For a little while, he was.