Jack Nicholson's Initial Reaction to Ledger's Joker Casting Will Surprise You
…And that initial reaction was fury.
As Nicholson himself said in a 2007 interview with MTV: "Maybe it's not a mistake. Maybe it was the right thing, but to be candid, I'm furious."
He explained further that he was never been asked about reprising his iconic performance as the Joker in Tim Burton's Batman ( 1989) and did not understand the reason why, which was one of his reasons for such strong emotional reaction.
The other, unstated, reason, might be not obvious to fans of today's superhero movies, with their increasingly common recasts. Back then, in early 2000s, recasting was much less acceptable.
Up until Ledger's casting in The Dark Knight, Nicholson was only the second actor to ever play the Joker in live-action (the first was Cesar Romero in the 1960s television series). And by early 2000s his performance was what nearly everyone remembered when thinking about the Joker on the screen. Sure, by the time of The Dark Knight's filming Nicholson was approaching seventy, but as his performance in the role of Frank Costello in The Departed (2006) indicates he still had vigor to play a villain. So he expected to at least be contacted during the casting for the Joker in the new film.
Now, today too there are cases of an actor becoming so strongly associated with his character, that the character gets retired with the actor, see Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, for example. But back then this was much closer to the norm.
Cases like three different Batman actors at the same time (not counting Michael Keaton, who is sort of disqualified from playing Batman at the peak of the character's life by age) or Superman getting recast while Henry Cavill is still able and probably willing to play him, and that's not even counting characters in TV series would have been perceived as much stranger in that decade.
But now the times have changed. In fact, with DCU 's shakeup coming under James Gunn leadership we probably can expect more recasts in near future. And it even might be argued that with superhero movies and TV series becoming so very popular and frequent, it is practically inevitable that various incarnations of the same popular characters are going to be played by different actors at some point.