When Robert Pattinson was first announced to be playing the title role in The Batman, there was a very vocal backlash from certain sections of the fanbase, which was almost entirely rooted in the fact that he portrayed one of the leads in The Twilight Saga almost a decade previously.
Of course, that kind of response is nothing new when it comes to major Bat-casting news. Fans were so upset that Tim Burton had selected Michael Keaton as his Dark Knight that they bombarded Warner Bros. headquarters with angry letters, but he’s long since been regarded as one of, if not the best big screen version of the character we’ve ever seen.
Similarly, not a lot of people were on board with the idea of the young, handsome Heath Ledger tackling the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, but his Academy Award winning performance became instantly iconic. Ben Affleck’s previous life as tabloid fodder also raised some eyebrows when Zack Snyder hired him to suit up in the DCEU, but now Justice League supporters would love nothing more than to see him finally make that standalone movie.
The point is, it’s far too early to judge how Pattinson is going to fare under the cape and cowl, although the first trailer for The Batman was hugely promising. In any case, in a new interview, the actor opened up about his casting and revealed that any time he talks about the role, there are always fans getting offended by anything he says.
“I mean, I’ve got a lot of thoughts. Well, it’s funny, like, I’ve done so many movies where, you know, I play these sort of partially monstrous characters. And whenever I’ve been promoting them, you know, normally, no one cares what you say about it. And I’ve just noticed every single time I say one sentence about Batman, there’s this massive, I’m offending swathes of Batman fans. But, I mean, it’s kind of, I mean, the interesting thing about Batman itself is that you can basically… it’s been played in so many different ways. The comics cover so much ground. The movies cover so much ground. I mean, if you’re going on the kind of… if you’re trying to play a historically accurate Batman, I mean, you could literally play anything. So I guess it’s kind of what Matt Reeves is directing and kind of wants to go for.”
Pattinson’s right in saying that there’s no definitive take on the Caped Crusader, and that’s one of the reasons the superhero has remained so popular. Indeed, the Dark Knight is capable of constantly being updated and reinvented for modern audiences, something the 34 year-old would have certainly had in the back of his mind during The Batman‘s shoot.
