A guy who used to sleep in his car in a Chicago alley, strung out on heroin, made his first movie a few blocks from that same alley. The movie was The Dark Knight, and he played the Joker's henchman, standing a few feet from Heath Ledger. He only got the part because Christopher Nolan rejected him first. Dastmalchian was doing small theater gigs around Chicago and paying rent as a telemarketer and a movie theater usher when the casting call went out. He read for one of the guys in clown masks who rob the bank in the opening scene. He was pretty sure he'd booked it. A week later he found out they'd already shot it without him. A few months after that, his phone rang with a completely different role. Thomas Schiff, the paranoid schizophrenic who hides in the police honor guard at the commissioner's funeral with the Joker. That's who you're looking at in the photo. It was the first movie set he'd ever walked onto, and on his last day of the shoot he walked past the alley where he used to sleep, five years after he got clean. The movie made a billion dollars and he still couldn't find an agent. He moved to LA with The Dark Knight on his résumé, and the small agencies and management companies he went to turned him down anyway. So he wrote about the car. Animals is about two heroin addicts living in a beat-up car by the Lincoln Park Zoo, and he cast himself as the guy he used to be. It won a special jury award at SXSW in 2014 for courage in storytelling, and his son was born about a month later. Denis Villeneuve kept hiring him, for Prisoners, Blade Runner 2049 and Dune, and one of the first things Denis asked him was what working with Nolan was like. Fifteen years after The Dark Knight, Nolan brought him back for Oppenheimer and wanted to know what working with Denis was like. Nine days ago he opened as M. Bison in Street Fighter, the main villain of a big Paramount release, playing the part Raul Julia made famous. If Nolan had said yes the first time, he'd have made his movie debut as a dead guy in a clown mask.