WARNING, SPOILER: Don’t read if you haven’t seen The Batman, which is in theaters right now. This story discusses a major spoiler at the end of the movie.
When director Matt Reeves sat down to consider his vision for The Batman, he wanted to embrace the idea from the comics that when Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) found his place as a costumed vigilante, he would inspire his future gallery of villains to take over their people as big as life. As the film progresses, this transformation begins for both villains Paul Dano the Riddler and Colin Farrell the Penguin, as well as Batman’s quasi-crime-fighting partner Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz), who becomes Catwoman.
While Dano the Riddler is central to the story, Reeves also wanted to give viewers the sense that other possible Batman villains might be lurking on the periphery, just out of the camera’s view.
“I thought it would be really cool if so much Gotham fabric already existed,” Reeves tells Variety. “And it was like an old Warner Bros. gangster movie, and if you take a certain twist, you can see the character in his origin.”
This feeling is no better demonstrated than in the movie’s penultimate scene, after Riddler Dano is locked up in Arkham Asylum, stricken with despair that his grand plan to destroy Gotham has been thwarted by Batman. As he screams in pain, a voice from the cell next to him whispers from behind the door.
– What they’re saying? says the prisoner. “One day you are at the top. Next time you’re the clown.” As the camera pulls back, Riddler and the prisoner break into laughter, and a new vicious friendship is born.
The character played by Barry Keoghan (The Eternals, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) is credited as Arkham’s “Invisible Prisoner”. But any astute Batman fan — or, for that matter, new to Batman — knows who this prisoner is supposed to be.
“You’re right,” says Reeves. “It’s the Joker.”
While it may seem obvious that Reeves placed this scene at the end of The Batman to introduce Keoghan as the main villain of the inevitable sequel, the director was quick to explain that not only was this not his intention, but he’s not sure Keoghan’s Joker will appear in any more. any Batman movie.
“This is not an Easter egg scene,” he says. “This isn’t one of those scenes in the end credits of Marvel or DC where it goes like, ‘Hey, here’s the next movie!’ In fact, I have no idea when we will return to this character in the movies.”
It turns out that Reeves had originally planned for Keoghan’s Joker to play a (slightly) bigger role in his film – only to have Keoghan almost completely eliminated from the film. Here’s everything the director had to say about the character and what his future could be in his Batman universe, including a possible HBO Max series about Arkham Asylum.
Paul Dano in Batman. Warner Bros. / Everett Courtesy Collection
“Our anniversary is coming soon, isn’t it?”
In an early version of The Batman, Keoghan actually appeared much earlier, in a scene after revealing that the Riddler killed the Gotham City police commissioner (before Jeffrey Wright’s Jim Gordon got the job) and left another addressed note. to Batman. Between the Riddler’s notes giving Batman an uncomfortable look and the revelation that the Riddler is killing the city’s leaders, up to his neck in corruption, Batman is nervous about what to do with what the Riddler is doing.
“I thought he would be very unsure about it and he would probably want to find some way to get into [Riddler’s] mindhunter like in Manhunter or Mindhunter is the idea of profiling someone so you can predict their next move,” says Reeves.
So Reeves filmed the scene where Batman sneaked inside Arkham by going to the door of a particular prisoner.
“And this guy is like, ‘It’s almost our anniversary, isn’t it?'” Reeves says. “You get the idea that they’re in a relationship and that this guy obviously did something and Batman somehow got him into Arkham.”
As they talk, Batman tells the Joker that he wants to know how the Riddler thinks. Joker’s response, relayed by Reeves: “What do you mean, you want to know how he thinks? You guys think the same.”
Reeves smiles. “What he’s really doing is getting inside Batman’s head,” he says. “As well as [Batman] vehemently opposes this idea. So that was the scene. It was the scene that unsettled him.”
Ultimately, however, Reeves felt the scene fell into the same rhythm as other parts of the film. So he cut. “It wasn’t necessary,” he says. “It was one of those scenes where, given how complicated the story was, by taking it out, the story kept moving as it should.”
Matt Reeves directs Robert Pattinson on the set of The Batman. Contributed by Jonathan Ollie/Warner Bros.
“This place will never change”
Cutting out the first Joker scene was so heartbreaking that Reeves intends to release it as soon as enough people see The Batman.
“It’s a really creepy, cool scene,” he says. “It was a scene that was supposed to introduce this guy and just tease the audience to say, ‘Oh my God, is he here too? And he’s not the Joker yet – what will it be? And then it seems so adorable in the story, since we already set it up to be the end of the story, the end of the Riddler arc, be it that he was in the cell next to this guy.”
But when Reeves cut the first scene, he thought that the second scene with the Riddler should also be cut, removing Keoghan from the film entirely. However, when he was testing the film, he realized that the loss of the Joker and Riddler’s creeping encounters (to change the catchphrase) affected the film’s final scene, in which Selina pleads for Batman to leave Gotham with her, knowing that he is destined to stay and fight for his city. .
“Because when Selena tells him, ‘This place is never going to change,’ you haven’t seen that there are actually problems already brewing,” says Reeves. “Did you feel like you couldn’t just go with her? Go with her! What is the problem? What is wrong with you?! It changed the emotional stakes. It wasn’t the same.” Reeves also disliked losing the final part of the Riddler arc, in which, after a lifetime of neglect and isolation, he finally finds a compatriot, albeit a bloodthirsty psychopath.
So he brought back the Joker Riddler scene. “At first I tested it without it; when I put it back in, the scores for the ending went up again,” he says. “And I think it’s not just because people liked seeing this character. It changed how people reacted to the very end of the movie when they saw that Gotham was still Gotham and that Batman really didn’t have a choice. He has to keep doing what he’s going to do.”
Reeves knows that the appearance of the Joker so close to the end of a film will invariably lead to audiences expecting to see more of him in the next film. But that was far from his goal. “I’ve never tried to say, ‘Hey, guess that’s the Joker.’ Next movie!” he says. “The idea was to say, ‘Hey, listen, if you think the problems in Gotham will go away, you can forget about it. It’s already here. And it’s already delicious.”
Left: Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs; right: Barry Keoghan. Courtesy of the Everett Collection; Provider: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
“So they played a joke on me”
To maintain an air of mystery and reinforce the idea that this Joker is not the full Joker, Reeves decided to film both Keoghan scenes with the actor’s face darkened and partly out of focus. But he still worked with prosthetic make-up artist Michael Marino (Journey 2 to America) to develop the full look for this Joker.
“I said, ‘The shape of his hair, the shape of his mouth, it’s all readable, but soft,'” Reeves says of his conversation with Marino. “So he knew it was a canvas he would have to deal with.”
With so many Jokers in film history, the challenge was figuring out how to differentiate Keoghan’s portrayal of the character from his predecessors. So Reeves and Marino turned to the original inspiration for the Joker: Conrad Veidt’s performance in the 1928 silent film The Man Who Laughs, based on the novel by Victor Hugo.
“It’s like The Phantom of the Opera,” says Reeves. “He has a congenital condition that makes him unable to stop smiling, which is terrible. His face is half covered for most of the film.” Although barely visible in the film, Marino’s makeup resembled Veidt’s, giving Keoghan an ongoing wry smirk.
Even for a character who only has a few minutes of screen time, Reeves wanted to make sure that the Joker in his film was imbued with a clear psychological motivation, so he also extrapolated what it would be like to have a baby born with a condition where he never stopped smiling.
“This is not about some version where he falls into a vat of chemicals and his face is distorted, or something like that. [Christopher] Nolan did it, where there is some mystery in how he carved these scars on his face, ”he says. “What if this guy had this disease from birth and was cursed? He had this smile that people looked at, it was grotesque and terrifying. Even when he was a child, people looked at him in horror, and in response he said: “Well, they played a joke on me,” and this was his nihilistic view of the world.
Left: Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight; Right: Joaquin Phoenix in Joker.
“I was looking for someone who would be fearless”
When Keoghan’s casting was announced, his character was introduced as a Gotham City cop named Stanley Merkel who works with Jim Gordon.
“I didn’t want to call him the Joker,” says Reeves. “I wanted it to be so leaning forward that people who were fans were like, ‘Oh my god, I think it’s the Joker. I think they’re making the Joker.” But Reeves also knew that if he announced Keoghan’s real name on screen – “The Invisible Prisoner of Arkham” – it wouldn’t take long for fans to guess what he was up to.
“I didn’t want to create all this speculation that we’re doing the Joker by calling him by his name, so we thought let’s make him a cop and then people really won’t think too much about it.” He says. Alas, between the test screening leaks and the cryptic Instagram post, the internet has been thinking a lot about who Keoghan played long before The Batman debuted and figured out that he really does play the Joker.
It remains an open question whether Keoghan will continue to play the Joker.
“There might be places,” Reeves says. “There are things that I am very interested in doing in the Arkham space, maybe for HBO Max. There are things we talked about there. So it’s very possible. It’s also possible that there is some kind of story that goes back to where the Joker appears in our world.”
Similarly, Reeves is well aware of the many memorable performances of actors as the Joker, including Jack Nicholson, Mark Hamill, Jared Leto and Oscar winners Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix.
“We made a really concerted effort to make this movie different from other Batman movies because we needed it,” he says. “That’s something to think about with the Joker. It has been done well, several times.”
When Reeves met with Keoghan about the role of the Joker, he said he told the actor about his concerns. “I told Barry from the beginning, ‘Look, I don’t know where this is going to lead. I can’t even promise that he will ever return. I do not know.’ And I still feel that way. I’m not exactly sure.”
For this reason, Reeves wanted someone willing to take on the “hard act” of playing the Joker, even if the performance only lasted a few meager minutes. “I was looking for not only a good actor, but also a fearless person,” he says. “Joaquin, when we were filming the movie, he just won an Oscar. They already thought that after Heath Ledger, you would not play the Joker again. And then comes Joaquin. So I can imagine an actor saying, “Nowhere to go but down!”
Reeves chuckles. “Barry was absolutely delighted. That, along with the fact that I loved him as an actor, was the deciding factor. And we did it.”
Whether they will ever do it again must remain a painful mystery for now.
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