Even though Barry Keoghan’s casting in The Batman initially named him as the Gotham City Police Department’s Stanley Merkel, who has a comic book history of his own, we’ve been inundated by scuttlebutt touting the Eternals star as the Joker to Robert Pattinson’s Dark Knight.
Fans definitely want it to happen based on the reactions to the initial spate of rumors, while Keoghan’s own brother leaned into the speculation on social media, although there’s a distinct possibility he was just trolling. Then again, an uncovered listing revealed that prosthetics designer Mike Marino was working with Keoghan’s character, who was named as “Unseen Arkham Prisoner”.
Of course, that doesn’t mean the Dunkirk actor will be the latest name to play the Clown Prince of Crime in The Batman, but there’s definitely at least a little weight to the repeated reports. Stoking the flames even further, director Matt Reeves teased a deleted scene involving Keoghan during an interview with TechRadar, one that he’s hoping we’ll all get to see eventually.
“There were scenes we cut that I liked. In fact, there’s a scene with the unseen prisoner, who appears at the end of the movie in Arkham with the Riddler. There was an earlier scene where Batman went to Arkham to try to profile the Riddler, and Barry is in that scene. It’s a very cool scene, and I’m sure we’ll we’ll release the scene after the movie comes out, because it’s a really cool deleted scene.”
When the director of the movie is naming Keoghan as “the unseen prisoner” and not Stanley Merkel, then it really makes you wonder if he really is the Joker after all. One huge positive is that we’ve got less than a week until we find out, and you can bet his identity will be one of the biggest talking points coming out of The Batman.
