With Gotham already having put its own stamp on longstanding Batman villains such as the Riddler, Penguin, Mr. Freeze and Scarecrow, you’d think the Joker would be fair game. I mean, if Smallville prominently featured Lex Luthor, then why can’t the Dark Knight’s greatest nemesis show up on this series?
Unfortunately, the red tape separating the Clown Prince of Crime from the producers is so thick that no Batarang is able to slice through it. In other words, WB’s motion picture division has declared him as being off limits. Still, we’ve received two wonderful consolation prizes by way of Cameron Monaghan, who’s had that honor of playing both Valeska twins, those being Jerome and Jeremiah.
In a way, this is Gotham‘s unique spin on there being multiple Jokers, a concept that DC will soon explore on the comic book side of things. Giving his own two cents concerning the situation is Monaghan himself, who broke down how the characters differ while recently speaking with ComicBook.com:
“I’ve enjoyed them both for different reasons. It was cool with Jerome how it was so heightened and kind of cartoony and insane and I could go in any direction with it because he was just this weird ball of destructive energy. It’s nice with Jeremiah to find some glimpses of humanity within him and to bring him back and to make him colder and more chilling in his [methods]. I’m also doing something a little different with this season as we’re continuing to develop the character than where he was at last. He was very systematic and completely irrational last season. Now he’s starting to, because he’s starting to lose his sanity and he’s slipping away without even realizing that he is. He has too much of an ego to realize that he’s slipping. I get to play around more and move around more within the character and I’m having a bunch of fun with this part, too, and also where it’s going is extremely exciting and I can’t wait to hit a couple of these story weeks that are coming up.”
Personally, I believe that if you were to fuse Jerome’s personality with Jeremiah’s look, you’d end up with the perfect live action Joker. That said, we should expect more surprises from the ever-evolving Jeremiah as he continues his descent.
Here’s what Monaghan had to add about the surviving Valeska brother, further describing how he’s of a different feather:
“It’s interesting with a guy like Jeremiah. What, I think, separates him from Jerome is Jerome is very much just sort of destruction for the sake of destruction and he was sort of just kind of chaotic and didn’t really have much of a plan. That’s cool, but what’s interesting with Jeremiah is he is sort of a craftsman and an engineer and a builder. He likes to create these elaborate systems. I think that’s where he finds most of his amusement and his happiness comes from the building of things. It just happens that the things that he’s building tend to hurt a lot of people in the process and he doesn’t really care about that. He’s singularly minded and extremely obsessive and right now he’s very obsessed with Bruce.”
Gotham returns for its fifth season sometime in early 2019 on Fox.
