As rumors swirl about who will be the next main villain in Matt Reeves The Batman, actor Barry Keoghan is looking back on his brief appearance in the first film as fans await a bigger role for Gotham's Clown Prince of Crime in the next installment.
To start off, the profile with GQ Magazine, Keoghan recounted how he landed the part.
"Originally there was no audition. I just made myself an audition tape because I saw an article saying that they wanted The Riddler in the new Batman.I was like, 'Oh, yeah, I'd love to play that.'"
"I just made a tape. I said, 'Feck, I'll just buy myself a cane and a hat, find myself a corridor and film myself walking down it. Add some little bit of swag to it and a bit of music, and let's see, will that get me an audition?' "
Keoghan also revealed that it took a quarter of the day to apply the grizzly prosthetics for his turn in The Batman.
"That took six hours to get into that, and it was like oh man, I couldn't sit still or six hours, I really couldn't," Keoghan reminisced.
He also humorously recalled a time when he was 80% through with the makeup process only for the studio to inform him that they were shutting the production down.
"I remember we were around five hours in, and [they] went 'We're shutting production down, there's COVID.' I was like 'Huh? Really? What? What happened?' There was this steel thing that went [into my cheek] and it was like slicing in. I was like, I'm really going to be left with a scar here."
The interview switches to The Batman at the 11:35 mark in the video below.
With rumors currently swirling around whether the Joker, the Court of Owls, Hush, Hugo Strange, Mr. Freeze or even Professor Pyg will be the next primary Batman antagonist in the next installment, fans should be learning more details in the coming weeks.
The Batman – Part II, and it is scheduled to be released in theaters on October 3, 2025. Filming was originally scheduled to start in November 2023 but has been delayed until March. With a four-month delay many fans are anticipating the sequel to push its release date.
And while fans are also looking forward to seeing more of the Joker in Part II, Reeves previously warned fans that Joker's brief appearance in the film wasn't necessarily an indication that he'll be the main villain in the sequel.
"I never was trying to say like, ‘Hey, guess what, here’s the Joker. Next movie!' The idea was more to say, ‘Hey, look, if you think that trouble is going to go away in Gotham, you can forget it. It’s already here. And it’s already delicious.'"
"It’s not about some version where he falls into a vat of chemicals and his face is distorted, or what [Christopher] Nolan did, where there’s some mystery to how he got these scars carved into his face,” Reeves explained.
“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."