Heath was in a surprisingly good mood.
That was unusual for press tours.
He had never particularly enjoyed them. Acting was one thing. Sitting in hotel rooms for hours while a revolving door of journalists asked variations of the same fifteen questions was something else entirely. The last time he had gone through a major campaign like this had been for The Dark Knight, and even then his involvement had been relatively limited because Daniel and the studio had deliberately tried to keep him out of as much of the marketing as possible.
The less people saw of him before release, the better.
That had suited Heath perfectly.
Things had changed considerably since then.
Press tours for Suicide Squad seemed to involve interviews with some kind of gimmick attached to them. He had answered questions while eating increasingly spicy food, played games involving cards and paddles, watched himself answer things people had apparently searched for on Google, and earlier that morning somebody had tried to convince him, Margot, and John Cena to identify Australian snacks while blindfolded.
A surprising number of the interviewers were YouTubers as well.
Heath was not particularly active online, so that part still confused him.
Was YouTube really that big now?
In this movie, Joker was one of the central antagonistic forces in the story, and even when he was not physically present, his influence hung over several characters, particularly Harley.
That meant Heath was required almost everywhere.
Fortunately, he liked the cast.
John Cena had been especially easy to get along with. They had filmed several scenes together, and John possessed the useful ability to remain entertaining no matter how long they had been sitting around. Margot was with Heath for most of the promotional schedule as well, which helped considerably. They had known each other long enough to become great friends.
At the moment, Heath and John were waiting near the entrance to another interview room while the production team finished preparing inside.
Heath glanced toward Margot, who was standing several yards away while her assistant showed her something on a tablet.
"You know," Heath said, "I think Margot is a bit strange around kangaroos."
John looked at him.
"That is a very specific observation."
"Have you noticed it?"
"No."
"We grew up with them. Nobody back home gets weird about kangaroos"
John shrugged. "Maybe she's scared of them."
"That's what I think."
Heath had noticed it twice during the trip. Whenever someone mentioned getting close to a kangaroo, Margot's entire expression changed for half a second. It was quick enough that most people would miss it, but Heath had spent too many years as an actor not to notice.
"She looked terrified yesterday," he said.
John laughed. "Now I want someone to bring one in here."
Margot approached them a moment later, handing the tablet back to her assistant.
"What are you two talking about?"
John answered immediately.
"Heath thinks you're scared of kangaroos."
Heath watched her.
There it was again.
For a fraction of a second, Margot looked like she was remembering something horrific.
Then it vanished.
"What? No," she said, drawing the word out. "I loveeee kangaroos."
Heath looked at John.
John looked back at him.
Margot narrowed her eyes.
"What?"
"Nothing," Heath said.
A production assistant appeared at the door.
"We're ready for you."
The three of them were led into the room. Cameras had been arranged around a small seating area with Suicide Squad posters behind them, and Heath noticed a handler standing near the corner holding a koala.
The hell?
He sat down beside Margot while John took the chair on her other side.
The first few questions were fairly standard. They talked about filming together, the size of the production, their favourite scenes that could be discussed without spoilers, and what it had been like working with such a large ensemble.
At one point, the koala was brought over.
John immediately wanted to hold it.
Margot did as well.
Heath accepted it mostly because everyone else had.
While the cameras took photographs, he found himself wondering what would happen if the handler suddenly announced that a kangaroo was waiting outside.
Eventually, one of the interviewers asked a question Heath was genuinely interested in answering.
"You played the Joker in The Dark Knight, but several years have passed since then. How did you approach the character this time? How has he changed or evolved from your previous portrayal?"
Heath leaned back slightly.
"In The Dark Knight, I think Joker still believes Batman is something he can break. He has this very simple philosophy about people, which is that everybody has a point where all the things they claim to believe in stop mattering. You apply enough pressure, frighten them enough, take enough away from them, hurt the right person, and eventually the rules disappear."
He paused for a moment.
"Batman becomes the most interesting version of that experiment because Batman has drawn this very clear line for himself. He'll hurt people, terrify people, but he won't kill. Joker sees that and immediately thinks, 'All right, then that is the line I have to make you cross.'"
"He thinks he wins," Heath continued. "That is important. By the end of The Dark Knight, he has Harvey Dent. Harvey was Gotham's great symbol of hope, and Joker destroys him. From Joker's perspective, that proves everything he believes. You take a good enough man and put him through enough pain, and eventually you get Two-Face."
He shifted slightly in his chair.
"But then Batman does something Joker doesn't account for. Batman takes the blame. Gordon protects the lie, Gotham remembers Harvey as a hero, and people actually unite around that version of him. Joker proves that Harvey can be broken, but Batman prevents that victory from becoming the conclusion Joker wanted."
"So what changes by Suicide Squad?"
"Time," Heath answered. "Years have passed, and Batman still hasn't given him the answer he wants."
He smiled slightly.
"That was much more interesting to me than simply saying Joker has become crazier. I don't think he's necessarily more insane. I think he's more focused. In the earlier film, Batman is a fascinating experiment. By Suicide Squad, Batman has become the exception to Joker's entire philosophy."
Heath glanced briefly toward Margot before continuing.
"I think Joker sees something of himself in Batman, but turned inside out. They've both been shaped by terrible things, but Batman responds by creating rules for himself, while Joker rejects the idea that rules mean anything at all. That fascinates him."
He paused.
"By this point, Batman isn't just someone he wants to defeat. He's the one person who keeps refusing to prove Joker right. So Joker starts seeing him almost as his opposite, his counterpart. The one person in Gotham whose existence actually challenges the way Joker understands people."
Heath smiled faintly.
"And that makes Batman much more important to him than he was before."
"And Batman is not in this movie."
"I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say Batman is missing for most of what happens in Suicide Squad."
"That's right," John added.
Margot nodded.
"He's definitely not around to fix everybody's problems."
The interviewer turned toward her.
"That leads naturally into Harley. How does this version of the Joker and Harley Quinn relationship work?"
She considered the question before answering.
"I think Harley is somebody who has spent a very long time constructing a story about her own life. She has a version of Joker in her head, a version of herself, and a version of what the two of them mean together. She has repeated that story to herself so often that it has become emotionally true, even when reality keeps contradicting it."
"So she believes he loves her?"
"Absolutely. Harley believes there is love there, and I don't think she sees herself as some helpless person who was simply dragged into this relationship. She thinks she chose him. She believes she understands Joker better than anybody else does, and in some ways, she probably does understand him better than most people."
She shifted slightly in her seat.
"But Harley is also incredibly intelligent, which makes the whole thing more complicated. She can analyse almost anybody else in a room. Then there's Joker, and suddenly she has these enormous emotional blind spots."
The interviewer looked between Margot and Heath.
"How did the two of you approach that together?"
"In almost opposite directions," Margot said.
"I was playing Harley as someone who believes she is living inside the greatest love story ever told," Margot continued. "She thinks they are this legendary couple against the world. Bonnie and Clyde taken to some ridiculous extreme."
"And Joker?"
Margot glanced toward Heath.
"He would probably find that description hilarious."
Heath nodded, then picked up the thought.
"Joker likes her almost the way someone might like a very unusual pet that occasionally bites people."
John laughed.
Heath continued.
"She occupies space in his life, certainly. But she does not occupy the same place in his mind that he occupies in hers. Batman does."
"So Harley's basically the other woman in her own relationship," John added.
There was a beat of silence before Margot burst out laughing. Heath followed, leaning back in his chair while John looked increasingly pleased with himself.
The interview continued for another twenty minutes before they moved on to another one, followed by another after that. Some of the questions barely registered with Heath anymore. Favourite costume, most difficult stunt, who broke character most often, who was most likely to survive the Suicide Squad in real life. He answered them, laughed when he was supposed to, and occasionally found something genuinely entertaining in the different gimmicks people had built around what otherwise would have been the same promotional conversation repeated fifty times.
The questions Heath actually enjoyed were the ones that dug deeper into the Joker.
Before filming, Heath had spent nearly a week with Daniel and several of the writers going through the Joker scene by scene, arguing over motivations, removing things that felt too obvious, and finding ways to show that he had changed without reducing that change to simply being louder or more unstable.
Heath had loved working through that.
By the time the last interview finished, he was happy to see the cameras disappear.
He stepped into the corridor, stretched his shoulders, and checked his phone. There were several messages waiting for him, including updated travel details for his flight to Las Vegas.
That was probably the biggest reason he had been in such a good mood all day.
Daniel Adler had sent him a treatment for a TV show.
Television was not something Heath had been particularly interested in doing.
Then he read the treatment.
Red Dead Redemption.
By the time Heath finished the first-season outline, television versus film had stopped mattering.
Arthur Morgan had gotten to him.
There was something painfully human about the character, a man who had spent most of his life convincing himself that loyalty to the people he loved could excuse almost anything he did for them. Arthur was violent, cynical, and frightening when he needed to be, but none of those things were presented as secretly admirable. He was a man who had wasted years following someone else's dream and only understood how badly he had lived when there was almost no life left to change.
Parts of it had hit Heath harder than he expected.
Arthur's darker periods reminded him uncomfortably of himself during years when his own head had been a much uglier place. Not because their lives were remotely similar, but because Heath understood the sensation of looking back at a version of yourself you no longer wanted to be and wondering how much damage that person had left behind. He had gotten out of that mindset. Arthur would not have the luxury of getting completely out, but he would at least be given the chance to decide what sort of man he wanted to be before the end.
Heath already knew his answer.
He was doing it.
He had to.
The Joker had been one of the most exhilarating characters he had ever played, and returning to him had reminded Heath why he had loved the role in the first place. Yet somewhere over the years, a small part of him had begun resenting what some people had turned the character into. They admired the wrong things, quoted the ugliest parts as though Joker were delivering wisdom instead of revealing how profoundly broken his worldview was, and sometimes seemed more interested in celebrating the monster than understanding what the story was saying about him.
Heath did not hate the role for that. He still loved the Joker and probably always would.
But he wanted another role that could challenge him at that level without simply being the Joker again.
Arthur Morgan felt like that role.
"Your costume finally made it," Heath said when he looked up.
A wardrobe assistant was approaching with another version of John's Peacemaker costume, carefully covered and carried between two people.
John stared at it.
"Well, they're late."
He had spent a ridiculous amount of the promotional tour wearing some version of the costume already. Cena had thrown himself completely into Peacemaker, even wearing the costume during appearances when nobody had actually asked him to.
Heath pointed toward it.
"You can wear that in Japan while I go to Vegas and watch people punch each other."
Margot looked over.
"Oh, the Red Dead thing?"
Heath nodded.
John frowned. "What Red Dead thing?"
"A great TV show Daniel is making."
"Oh, so he's got you doing one too." John shook his head. "I'm getting either a Peacemaker movie or a Peacemaker show. I'm hoping for the show. That sounds more fun." He paused. "Does the man ever sleep? Because I read somewhere that he actually has an army of specially trained super-monkeys writing everything for him."
He kept a perfectly straight face for several seconds. Margot cracked first, and then John broke into laughter, and Heath joined them.
"I'm going to get some sleep before the flight."
"Have fun in Vegas," Margot said.
Heath gave them a wave and left.
Several hours later, somewhere over the Pacific, he was reading the treatment again.
He had already finished the thing several times, but now he was going more slowly, paying less attention to the broad plot and more to Arthur himself. Heath highlighted small details, made notes in the margins, and started thinking about how the man moved, how he occupied space around people he trusted compared with strangers, and how much of his physical presence would come from someone who had spent most of his life fighting and riding.
By the time he landed and his car was taking him through Las Vegas that evening, Heath had reached the final season again.
He quietly tried a line to himself, testing a rough Western accent that sat lower than his normal voice. The first attempt sounded too theatrical. He tried it again, dropping some of the performance from it and letting the words drag slightly more naturally.
The driver glanced at him through the mirror.
"Did you need something, Mr. Ledger?"
Heath looked up.
"What? Oh, no. No, I was just reading."
The driver nodded.
Heath smiled and returned to the treatment.
By the time they reached the arena, the place was already packed. Netflix branding covered several entrances, and groups of celebrities, athletes, executives, and invited guests were gathering around the VIP areas before the broadcast began.
Heath was led through security and into one of the private sections.
He spotted Daniel almost immediately.
Daniel was standing with several people, taking photographs and smiling while someone spoke to him and another person waited nearby for their turn. When he finally looked past them and noticed Heath, his expression brightened.
"Heath."
Daniel excused himself and walked over.
"How was Australia?"
Heath shook his hand.
"Great."
Before Heath could say more, Ted Sarandos approached. Introductions were made, and within minutes Daniel had somehow turned what Heath had expected to be an exploratory conversation into something considerably more direct.
"I want Heath as Arthur," Daniel said.
No buildup.
No cautious suggestion.
Just that.
Ted looked toward Heath, then back at Daniel.
"I don't think anyone here is going to object to Heath Ledger playing this character."
One of the content executives nodded. "Not after what we've read."
Another added, "I mean, if Mr. Ledger commits to it, then yes. It's great."
Heath looked at Daniel.
Daniel said nothing, leaving the answer to him.
"I will. I'm very excited about this project."
Ted smiled. "Then that makes one of our biggest casting problems considerably easier."
It was almost absurdly simple.
Heath had worked in Hollywood long enough to know that things like this were normally followed by weeks of meetings. Names would be discussed, agents would become involved, studios would worry about demographics, schedules, salaries, international appeal, insurance, and twenty other things that had very little to do with whether someone was actually right for the part.
Daniel had walked into the conversation, said he wanted Heath Ledger, and within minutes everyone seemed to be operating from the assumption that Heath Ledger would play Arthur Morgan.
Heath found himself studying him differently as the evening went on.
He had always known Daniel was powerful.
Everyone in the industry knew that.
But knowing it abstractly was different from watching it happen around him.
Daniel was twenty-seven years old, yet studio executives twice his age approached him rather than waiting for him to approach them. Producers crossed the room to shake his hand. Actors stopped him for conversations. Someone from another network tried to get five minutes with him while a Netflix executive was still talking. An investor Heath vaguely remembered seeing on the cover of a financial magazine greeted Daniel like an old friend.
The Oscars, the books, the franchises, and the films probably helped.
Being a billionaire certainly did not hurt either.
But there was something beyond the money. Daniel had accumulated enough successes that people trusted his instincts even when those instincts sounded ridiculous at first. Heath had watched him do it with the Joker. He had watched him do it with DC. Now Netflix was prepared to build a massive three-season Western, with an enormous amount of money behind it, around a treatment Daniel had handed them and the actor Daniel had chosen to lead it.
After the fight, Heath and Daniel left the arena together.
The crowd outside was still thick with people filtering away from the venue, and they barely made it twenty feet before someone recognized them. A couple of fans asked for photographs, then several more joined them once they realized who was standing there. Heath tried to hang back but ended up posing for two pictures, while Daniel answered a shouted question from a paparazzo about his marriage and when the wedding would be with little more than a wave.
Another photographer tried asking whether the rumours about Daniel buying an NFL team were true.
Daniel ignored that one completely.
His phone rang just as security cleared a path toward the waiting car, and he answered it while climbing inside. Heath followed, settling into the seat across from him as the doors closed and the noise outside immediately became distant.
Daniel listened for several seconds.
"No. No, we're not doing the blood orgy thing."
Heath slowly looked over at him.
The what?
"Because it's too much, Fede. Yes, too much." He listened again and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "You want to shoot it anyway?"
Another pause.
"I said no. Let's end the conversation with that. I'm not wasting money shooting footage we already know we're not going to use."
Heath stared out the window for a moment, trying very hard not to imagine what sort of discussion required the phrase blood orgy.
Daniel sighed.
"You know what? Let's just talk tomorrow."
He ended the call and dropped the phone beside him.
Heath waited perhaps two seconds.
"Blood orgy?"
Daniel looked at him.
"It's for this movie I'm making, Event Horizon."
He continued before Heath could ask.
"It's about a haunted spaceship, essentially. Fede wants this sequence where the crew completely loses their minds and starts ripping each other apart. Blood, sex, mutilation, people doing increasingly horrible things to each other. Basically an orgy of violence."
He leaned back.
"It's already a violent movie. I don't have a problem with that. But there's a point where it becomes too much."
Heath nodded.
That made considerably more sense.
For one very brief moment, he had wondered whether Daniel was involved in something far more horrible. Considering some of the eccentric billionaires Heath had met over the years, it had not seemed entirely impossible.
Daniel leaned back.
"You hungry?"
"Yeah."
"We can get dinner somewhere. The others were heading to the Bellagio, but I'm not allowed to gamble anymore, so it's probably better not to go there."
Heath looked at him.
"Not allowed to gamble? What happened?"
"My bodyguards staged an intervention."
Heath stared at him.
"I started gambling too often."
"How often is too often?"
"Apparently often enough that they thought I was going to start having a problem."
Daniel shrugged.
"So I stopped."
Heath studied him for a moment.
"You've got some good people around you."
"Yeah."
Daniel said it without joking this time.
"I do."
He looked toward Heath again.
"So, dinner?"
"Yeah. Let's do it."
Daniel leaned forward and told the driver where to take them before settling back into his seat.
The car had only been moving for another minute when something from Australia returned to Heath's mind.
"Danny."
"Yeah?"
"I've got a question. Is Margot scared of kangaroos?"
Daniel's expression changed.
It happened so quickly that Heath might have missed it if he had not spent the previous day watching for exactly the same reaction from Margot.
For a fraction of a second, Daniel froze.
The same brief flash of remembered horror appeared before it was pushed away.
"No. Why?"
Heath watched him.
"Did she say something?"
"No."
"Good." Daniel nodded. "Because kangaroos are great. Love kangaroos. Yeah. They're great..."