It must be difficult to be an actor playing any kind of over-the-top movie villain in the next few years. Pretty much everyone is going to get compared to Heath Ledger's Joker, as long as that character is burned into our brains-- and, let's face it, when do you think you'll ever be able to forget that performance?
So it goes with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's take on Cobra Commander in G.I.. Joe, which producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura is already merrily comparing to the Joker-- for no apparent reason, really. In an interview with MTV News, Di Bonaventura said “I thought what was great in The Dark Knight was that Heath kept telling you different stories [about his past] so you never knew what it was, and they were all spooky and crazy. [In our film] you get to see it, and you get to understand what’s happened to this guy.”
Cobra Commander has varied from a whimsical type of villain in the TV show to a seriously dark bastard in the comic books, and apparently it's the darker version that will make it into the movie. “As we see it, he’s a very twisted character,” di Bonaventura said, saying even the character's voice would be creepier this time around. "I actually found the voice a little weak in the show…I’m sure I’ll get killed for saying that. I don’t know, it always seemed kind of silly. Hopefully we’re going to be a little more menacing.”
Dark is the way to go with villains now, since the Joker set the bar for how creepy you can go. Gordon-Levitt shouldn't even bother trying to match the Joker, but he's probably got a better shot than most at giving us another villain to be terrified of.
