Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix delivered two of the most argued-over Joker performances of the century — usually as a tribal fight about which movie is "real cinema." ActorRating asks a narrower question: how do audiences rate the performance, separate from the film's reputation?
Both turns have Community Ratings on this site. Both sit in different machines: one is chaos inside a crime epic; the other is a character study that swallowed a city. Comparing them only works if you keep film buzz from contaminating the acting score — which is why we surface Community Rating next to each link and keep Critic Aggregate (the film TMDB signal) separate on the rate page.
#01
Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight (2008)
Ledger's Joker is theatrical anarchy with a craftsman's precision — the smeared makeup, the voice that sounds borrowed from a damaged instrument, the sense that every scene tilts toward him even when he's not speaking. On ActorRating, this is one of the clearest community favorites in the cohort: people aren't just nostalgia-voting Batman; they're scoring a supporting performance that hijacked a blockbuster.
If you've only experienced this Joker through memes, go rate the five dimensions yourself. Chaos is easy to quote. Harder to score honestly once you separate it from the movie's legend.
