Well, The Batman has been out a few weeks now, so we guess it’s ok to openly discuss the fact that Barry Keoghan is in the movie as Batman’s most iconic villain, the Joker.
The scene in the movie is filmed in shadow and without giving us a good look at this version of the Harlequin of Hate and we see him manipulate Paul Dano’s Riddler and fool him into thinking that they’re friends undoubtedly so he can use him in some nefarious way in a future misadventure.
But, as fun as the scene was, we learned that Keoghan had filmed a more revealing scene that came earlier in the movie and set up an interesting dynamic between Batman and Joker. we learn in the scene that Joker is already in Arkham, put there by Batman exactly a year earlier and Batman, struggling over the Riddler case, was asking Joker for advice, setting him up as a Hannibal Lecter-type character, giving advice to Batman about other evils in Gotham.
However, the scene was cut: “It’s a really creepy, cool scene,” said Director Matt Reeves, “That was the scene that was meant to introduce this guy and just to tease the audience to go like, ‘Oh my god, he’s here too? And he’s not yet the Joker — what’s this going to be?’ And then it seems so delicious in the story, since we’d already set him up, to have the end of the story, the completion of the Riddler arc, be that he was in a cell next to this guy.”
Oh and, little tip, keep an eye on the paperclip…
Check out the scene here:
On the Joker’s new, horrific look, Reeves said: “He has a congenital disease where he can’t stop smiling and it’s horrific.
“What if this guy from birth had this disease and he was cursed? He had this smile that people stared at that was grotesque and terrifying. Even as a child, people looked at him with horror, and his response was to say, ‘Okay, so a joke was played on me,’ and this was his nihilistic take on the world.”
I, personally, have a love-hate relationship with this scene; I love Keoghan’s performance and his dynamic with Robert Pattinson’s Batman, it’s creepy, dark, and you can tell they have already had history but, much like Riddler in the movie, I hate his look here… I know Joker is a character than can be wildly re-invented from movie to movie, but the grotesqueness of him here, his overall monstrous appearance just doesn’t work for me here.
But I understand this is subjective and I know others like it a lot and that’s totally cool.
It will be interesting to see where this new Joker goes next and what Keoghan does with it.
“There’s stuff I’m very interested in doing in an Arkham space, potentially for HBO Max,” Reeves says, discussing the Arkham/CGPD series on HBO Max, “So it’s very possible. It also isn’t impossible that there is some story that comes back where Joker comes into our world.”
So it seems we’ll see him… sooner or later.
Check out the fully pieced together look at him below:
Barry Keoghan’s Joker in #TheBatman pic.twitter.com/uKEM0gyiSE
— Matt Ramos (@therealsupes) March 25, 2022
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