Incredible Fan Art Imagines It’s Bill Skarsgård As The New Joker

The Joker is one of the most iconic villains in comic book history, instantly recognizable even to people with only a passing familiarity with the medium. While we won’t see the Clown Prince of Crime in The Batman, it’s only a matter of time before he faces Robert Pattinson’s new take on the Caped Crusader, and some recent fan art has now imagined how Bill Skarsgård might look as the villain.

The iterations of the Jester of Genocide have been almost as varied as the actors portraying him, such as Jack Nicolson’s posturing gangster, Heath Ledger’s chaotic anarchist, or Mark Hamill’s scheming madman. In keeping with this, the images, the product of digital artist William Gray, see a number of pieces with the lanky Swede rocking the requisite corpse-white makeup and green hair, each inspired by a different take on the character, such as Batman: The Animated Series, Arkham Origins, or nightmarish graphic novel A Serious House on Serious Earth.

Of course, Skarsgård has already portrayed a terrifying clown, in the shape of the (mostly) human form of the titular fear demon from It and It: Chapter 2, and adding the Joker to other previous roles in the likes of Castle Rock and Hemlock Grove would cement him as someone to call upon when sinister unpredictability is required.

Intriguingly, several of the looks see Skarsgård bearing more than a passing resemblance to Cameron Monaghan’s version of the villain who eventually turned up in TV show Gotham after an increasingly tedious litany of bait and switches, which will likely not amount to anything in a practical sense, but tacitly suggests consistencies between the various realities that branch out across the multiverse.

The Batman is already set to feature more than enough of the Caped Crusader’s rogues gallery, variously involving the Riddler, the Penguin, Catwoman and Carmine Falcone, but it will most likely also have at least some vague allusion to the Joker’s presence somewhere in the crime-ridden city, even if it’s just as a newly rising psychopath, and when he emerges as a foil to the World’s Greatest Detective, Skarsgård certainly looks like he could do justice to the role.