Wearing the Joker's traditional color palette, the character is dressed with a thin '60s tie and a green waistcoat, topped by a purple overcoat. relating to a feel to New Romanticism. His shoes have an upward swoop at the toe, reminiscent to clown shoes.
His face is covered in a cracked and runny white pancake, with his eyes thickly rimmed in black. A sloppy red grin is painted on the Glasgow smile beneath the makeup, extending from the mouth to the cheeks.[19] Film critic Peter Travers wrote about the Joker as having "grungy hair and yellow teeth of a hound fresh out of hell."
The mannerism of the character carries a quality of unpredictability. With the voice using odd shifts in pitch, the dialogue is read hitting higher notes, followed by an immediate lower voice able of landing two octaves below. Nolan acknowledges this unpredictability to be part of the character's slinky physical movements too, saying that Ledger's performance "[is] always a surprise... About the Joker's physical appearance, Geoff Boucher wrote for the Los Angeles Times that the character probes the facial scars with his tongue and "walks with shoulders bowed and his chin out and down, like a hyena.