The Big Picture Before becoming one of Hollywood's best chameleons and a horror mainstay, David Dastmalchian was a local theater actor looking for his big break in Chicago. Everything changed when he was paired up with the late great Heath Ledger as one of the Joker's henchmen, Thomas Schiff in The Dark Knight, giving him a memorable first big-screen role.
The connection to Ledger's famous Joker performance came from Australian talk show titan Don Lane. "The Cairnes brothers sent me a bunch of footage that they accumulated of Don Lane," he added. "If you’re not familiar with Don Lane, he was the Johnny Carson of Australian television. He was an American who lived in Australia, and he became the host of this huge syndicated talk show .
It's fitting that the same host with ties back to The Dark Knight would be one of his biggest inspirations for Delroy, but he was far from his only subject to study. "As a kid, I watched shock TV hosts like Morton Downey Jr. and Phil Donahue, and I found them utterly fascinating ," Dastmalchian said, adding that he also watched the classics like Carson, Dick Cavett, and David Letterman.
"This role was like being a jazz drummer and then all of a sudden getting asked to sit in for Tool drummer Danny Carey on tour. It just wasn’t in my wheelhouse, man. I’m not the guy who’s funny. I’m not a comedian. I have a lot of skills as an actor, but to make this shit feel authentic and real was so terrifying for me. So I wanted to study every idiosyncrasy, the way that they gestured and the way that they’d land joke punchlines.