In The Batman, the World's Greatest Detective is pushed to his limits by the maniacal, dastardly clever Riddler. Ultimately, we learned that the villain's endgame was to bring Carmine Falcone into the light in order to enact his revenge; the big twist there, however, was that he'd been watching over the Iceberg Lounge from a nearby apartment the whole time, ready to take the shot and kill the gangster.
Now, one eagle-eyed fan has spotted Edward Nashton in that apartment at the 31:55 mark. While that shadowy figure wouldn't mean much on a first viewing, his presence here is a terrific bit of foreshadowing. With The Batman available to watch from home starting today, we're anticipating seeing more Easter Eggs like this, and Matt Reeves will hopefully continue to confirm their validity.
When we spoke to Paul Dano about playing The Riddler earlier this year, he told us what it was like to embrace this villain's madness. "Matt laid out a beautiful script, but a great challenge as well. The first conversation he and I had were about hero and villain and the two sides of trauma," Dano explained. "I think that was really the seed from which everything else grew."
"You can’t just jump to the villain part of the madness. Taking it from there and slowly building his past to page one and how that gets you there and who he was without the mask and what the mask allows him to be" (you can check out our interview with The Batman producer Dylan Clark here).
The Batman is now streaming on HBO Max.