USA Today has debuted a couple of new stills from tonight’s Fall Finale of Gotham, and they provide our first glimpse of House Of Cards actor Nathan Darrow as classic Batman villain, Mr. Freeze.
Though the character will be introduced during tonight’s episode, don’t expect to see him go full-on Freeze just yet, as they’re just setting up the events that lead Wayne Enterprises cryogenics engineer Victor Fries to take up the freeze gun after the death of his beloved wife, Nora, who’ll be played by Kristen Hager.
Mr. Freeze has proved a tricky bad guy to adapt in the past, and of course, his only big-screen incarnation came courtesy of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s much-maligned take in Joel Schumacher’s Batman And Robin – but that won’t affect Darrow’s performance one way or the other, since he’s never actually seen the movie.
Here’s what he told USA Today when they asked if he felt Schwarzenegger’s version “ruined” the character.
Well, it depends on your definition of the word “ruined.” (Laughs) I have to plead some ignorance here. I never saw Batman & Robin, and I’ve seen bits of the old TV show but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything involving Mr. Freeze. I looked at some artwork and there’s these backstories that’s written about the character. I grabbed some of that. I find the character to be like a lot of the characters on the show: What becomes interesting is this “villainy” is really something that is revealed out of a person in some particular circumstances with a particular history and what they care about combined with their own level of fear about being alive and being in the rather difficult world of Gotham.
One thing’s for sure, he does pretty similar to The Flash’s Captain Cold, which may not sit too well with fans of the CW show. At any rate, tune into Gotham later tonight to get a better look at our new Mr. Freeze.
