When Law & Order’s breakout star Nick Creegan auditioned for the CW’s Batwoman, he had no idea that he was going to make history as the first Black actor to play the latest incarnation of The Joker, DC Comics’ iconic Clown Prince of Crime. On the show, Creegan’s character, Marquis Jet, is introduced as a nine year-old whose schoolbus is hijacked by the original Joker, who attacks Jet by buzzing him in the head with a high-powered joy buzzer, causing him brain damage. Eventually, he begins to dress in purple and dyes his hair orange, taking on the Joker persona.
The storyline is a wild ride, and secrecy around it was so tight before production began that it was kept even from the actor himself as he read for the part. As he says in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, “Even though I was auditioning for Marquis Jet, I felt that sort of crazy in the way that he was speaking, and was curious what this guy would turn into. My friend who was helping me with the self-tape made a joke, saying, ‘Well, you have on a purple shirt. That would be hilarious if you became The Joker’.”
It wasn’t until he had booked the role and preparing to fly to Vancouver to begin production that he was let in on his character’s season-long arc. “Caroline Dries called me the day before I was going to fly to Vancouver and said, ‘You become our new Joker.’ My mouth dropped. It didn’t register. I lost it.”
Creegan is the latest in a long line of actors to portray Batman’s deadliest foe, including comedian Caesar Romero, Jack Nicholson, and Heath Ledger, who won a posthumous Oscar for the role.