Michael Caine Explains His Approach To Alfred In ‘The Dark Knight’ Trilogy In New Memoir: “Alfred Needed To Be Very Tough Indeed”
The retired Michael Caine had a career with many peaks and a few valleys behind him. He’s won awards over the years and worked with the most talented people in the world ever since the 1960s, but Caine is known best these days for his collaborations with Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale, starting with Batman Begins in 2005.
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Caine played Bruce Wayne’s dutiful manservant and father figure Alfred Pennyworth for three films. In his new memoir Don’t Look Back, You’ll Trip Over: My Guide to Life, he explains his serious and reverent approach to the World’s Greatest Butler, knowing the character easily could’ve backslid into camp.
“The English butler is a familiar figure in fiction and movies. You can play him as a Jeeves, if you like, very refined and superior. Everyone remembers John Gielgud in Arthur (1981). But I thought, in this narrative setting, Alfred needed to be very tough indeed – he was Bruce Wayne’s protector and his mentor, but also his ally,” Caine said via Yahoo.
“You had to believe that he would go along with this incredibly dangerous secret life that Bruce had decided upon. Remember, this version of the Batman story is not cartoonish at all. It has wit and humor, of course, but the dark side and the pain are real. So Alfred’s involvement in Bruce’s secret work has to be credible,” he continued.
He then detailed his origin story for Alfred, which included serving his country and maybe His Majesty’s Secret Service, before keeping Wayne Manor tidy. “I gave him the backstory of an SAS sergeant, who’s been injured and run the mess – that’s how the Wayne family came to employ him as a butler. He cares deeply about Bruce and wants him to be happy, but there’s no question that he’s a trained killer too. He has the ambivalence of a father who knows that his adopted son has a mission in life that is also full of deadly risk,” Caine revealed.
He and Nolan also made Alfred the POV for the audience. “Yes, this was a deliberate strategy that Chris and I worked up. Alfred is Bruce’s moral compass and also the voice of the audience saying, ‘Hold on, what are you doing now?’ The Tim Burton Batman movies had been quite surreal and larger than life, but Chris’s version required people to believe in what they were seeing,” the actor said.
“That’s why Bruce’s training with the League of Shadows has to be so hard – you understand how this rich orphan was taught to be such a lethal vigilante. And, later in the story, Alfred is up to his eyes in it all, even if a big part of him just wants Bruce to let go of the quest for revenge for his parents’ death and to have a happy life. He understands that this young man is going to have to make Gotham safe, at least in his own eyes, and defeat all the villains before he can even think of that,” he continued.
Speaking of villains, Joker was one of the biggest in the trilogy, and you can’t talk about that without mentioning Heath Ledger. Ledger passed away months before The Dark Knight was released but left a lasting legacy that earned a posthumous Oscar. Caine, reflecting on working with him, makes it clear the experience was the opposite of the way it came across.
“Yes, he was a lovely guy, very gentle and unassuming. I wondered how he was going to play the Joker, especially as Jack Nicholson’s take had been so iconic. Brilliantly, Heath ramped up the character’s psychotic side rather than going for one-liners. His Joker was deeply, deeply warped and damaged, though you never find out exactly why, or what he’s really looking for,” Caine explained.
“As Alfred says to Bruce, ‘Some men just want to watch the world burn.’ And that was Heath’s version of the character: the smeared make-up, the weird hair, the strange voice. It was chilling. Absolutely floored me the first time I saw him in action – I was terrified!” he added. That aside, Ledger got along well with his co-stars.
“He and Christian were good friends and always having fun together. And then he was transformed into this scheming monster, driving a whole city towards mayhem. Looking back, I think Heath’s excellence made all of us raise our game. The psychological battle between the Joker and Batman is completely riveting. Are they in any way the same? What nudges one man to do good, and the other to do evil? The Joker wants to torment Bruce by convincing him that they’re two of a kind,” Caine observed.
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Recalling Ledger’s death and the press tour for TDK that followed, he said, “It was absolutely awful, it still makes me sad to think of it, more than 15 years on. An accidental overdose, just tragic. Heath was only 28 when he passed away. I hadn’t even made Zulu when I was that age. You think of what he might have gone on to achieve, it’s just heart-breaking. We were all terribly shocked, and it made doing the publicity for The Dark Knight that summer much more intense, because all the journalists wanted to talk about his death.”
But there was that dividend, and Caine was glad Ledger got the Oscar. “I was so pleased when he was awarded the posthumous Oscar, because it must have been at least some sort of comfort for his poor family. The truth is, we’d all hoped he would win an Academy Award and thought he should, even while we were still filming the movie. So it was just a very sad thing that he wasn’t around to accept it in person. It’s a performance for the ages, and even though his career was cut short so soon, he’ll be remembered as a great actor, I believe,” he shared.
We all will probably say the same about Michael Caine, who has the bulk of a century behind him. He turned 92 this month, and his memoir, which is structured in an interview format, came out this week.
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