Why Mark Hamill Replaced Tim Curry As The Joker On Batman: The Animated Series

Sometimes, casting isn't a linear process — and that couldn't have been more true when Mark Hamill replaced Tim Curry as The Joker on one of the best animated shows of all time, "Batman: The Animated Series." 

Curry, who was the original choice to play Batman's nemesis, was recast after producer Alan Burnett told co-creator Bruce Timm that he couldn't connect with his portrayal of the character. "He just couldn't wrap his head around Tim's performance," Andrea Romano, the show's voice director, told Vulture in 2017. From there, Hamill's agent contacted Romano and made known his client's desire to be involved, highlighting his love of comics to make him a more enticing prospect to play The Joker.

That said, Curry remembers the chain of events differently; speaking to ScreenGeek in 2017, he claimed that he was fired after a bout of bronchitis. Ultimately, Curry's laugh was used for one of The Joker's robots in the Season 1 episode "Be a Clown," and he also played an uncredited part in "Fear of Victory" (though neither appear on our list of the show's best episodes ever). 

Interestingly enough, Curry's funny, weird, and menacing vocal performance as The Joker was initially a hit with the show's creative team, who had already seen a bunch of actors doing their versions of Cesar Romero during the audition process. "They weren't treating the character seriously," Bruce Timm told Vulture. "Tim Curry actually came in and gave us something really close to what we wanted. It was funny and weird but also definitely had some menace to it."

Curry recorded a handful of episodes as the character before the creative team began to sympathize with Alan Burnett's concerns about his portrayal. Timm didn't want to have to re-record the episodes Curry had already done, but he ultimately folded — despite knowing the transition would be difficult. "It didn't take much for him to convince me, because I was kind of leaning that way myself," he explained to the outlet. "It's not that Tim was doing anything bad, it just wasn't quite what we wanted."

Luckily, the decision to recast Curry came around the same time that Hamill, who was originally cast as a business tycoon, told producers that he didn't "want to just come in and do a guest-star and disappear." So, Hamill auditioned for The Joker instead — and despite holding some reservations about playing such an iconic villain, he nailed it. The rest, as they say, is history.