DiCaprio and Phoenix passed on the Joker before Heath Ledger, says Nolan’s casting director

Heath Ledger wasn’t Christopher Nolan’s first port of call for the Joker. According to Nolan’s longtime casting director John Papsidera, the script for The Dark Knight went to Leonardo DiCaprio first, then to Joaquin Phoenix, and both ended up out of the picture. IGN’s report says Papsidera made the remarks at the Nashville Film Festival.

Papsidera headlined the festival’s NashFilm Creators Conference on 25 September 2026, and a transcript of the onstage Q&A shows how the story came out: he said the team sent the script to DiCaprio and never heard back. Phoenix then met them and explained that he didn’t want to make big movies. At the festival, Papsidera put it as three actors discussed in specific terms, with Ledger the third, though “certainly more actors” came up in wider conversations.

Ledger’s pitch landed because it matched Nolan’s. Papsidera said Ledger saw the Joker as an anarchist whose only aim was to tear everything down, which is how Nolan wanted the character portrayed. In a separate interview with Collider, Papsidera had described the process without naming names, as GamesRadar notes, so the Nashville talk is the first time the names have surfaced in this form.

Papsidera also spotted the irony in Phoenix’s refusal. He said it was ironic, because Phoenix later starred in a big movie and won the Academy Award for playing the Joker. That 2019 film took a very different route to the character, and the comparison keeps cropping up in unrelated places, as when Peter Jackson invoked Phoenix’s Joker for The Hunt for Gollum.

DiCaprio’s path crossed Nolan’s anyway. He went on to star in Inception, and he’s now reportedly lined up for Heat 2 alongside Christian Bale, though Amazon MGM says the deals aren’t finalised. For Papsidera, the Joker story is an example of the casting process working “not in the usual way”, a point he made while discussing Ledger and Phoenix.