'Gotham's Cameron Monaghan Reveals How He Prepared for His Joker Laugh

As most Batman fans will tell you, one of the most striking aspects about the Joker is his laugh. In every incarnation of the character, the disturbed, demented laugh of the villain is one of his most identifying features and Gotham's Joker-inspired villain is no exception. Now Cameron Monaghan, who played first Jerome Valeska and now Gotham's newest villain in Jerome's brother Jeremiah, reveals who he perfected his own Joker laugh.

Appearing on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Monaghan explained that he worked out his Joker laugh by laughing, just in a way that may have disturbed his neighbors.

"Look, you have to drive yourself a little insane to be able to play a role like this and I think with the voice, the movement, and with the laugh specifically it's very important that you get it right. That means a lot of repetition and so I would just sit and stare at myself in the mirror and make any face that I wanted to make and laugh, just laugh laugh laugh laugh," Monaghan said. "I think all my neighbors were like 'that dude has some serious problems, he needs to get on some heavy medication, we need to put this guy down.' And I've continued to do that over the course of the show."

It's something that has paid off. Monaghan's Jerome Valeska was chilling with his cackling, manic brand of chaos on Gotham. And even though Jerome is gone, dying after falling from a tall building, a new evil has emerged through Jeremiah is a more calm, collected, meticulous evil one that the actor has said was influenced by the infamous fictional serial killer, Hannibal Lecter.

"One of the main characters that we modeled Jeremiah from is Hannibal Lecter," Monaghan told ComicBook.com. "There are a lot of moments that made Hannibal Lecter so terrifying. [One] in my opinion, was even though he was the one in the cage, he was the one locked up under key, for some reason, because of his intelligence he was always the one who had control. He might have been in the cage, but he was the one who had all the cards and carried all the weight. That is something that Jeremiah has. No matter how this guy is backed into a corner, he plans for contingency and he is intelligent enough that he knows how to manipulate and hurt people. He can take control. He has power in those certain situations. It is something that is really spooky. I'm excited for people to see some of these scenes because I think there is some really great moments in them."

New episodes of Gotham air on Thursday nights at 8pm ET on FOX.