SPOILER ALERT: There are major spoilers for The Batman in this story.Now that The Batman has hit screens and brought cinematic delight to all our eyeballs, more details regarding some of the more secret elements are beginning to surface. Be warned, there are MAJOR SPOILERS to follow.
Speaking with IGN, The Batman director Matt Reeves has revealed some hugely intriguing details regarding the look of Barry Keoghan as the newest iteration of iconic villain The Joker. According to Reeves, his take on the DC character will harken back to the 1928 silent film that influenced the Joker in the first place, that of Conrad Veidt's Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs.
"In the scene that you'll see in the future, you'll see that we worked on what he looked like. And he's held in this very suspenseful way, away from you visually. But I wanted to create an iteration of him that felt distinctive and new, but went right back to the roots. So he's very much out of the Conrad Veidt mold and that idea of the silent film of The Man Who Laughs."
Instead of wearing make-up or having scars to create that terrifying smile, Barry Keoghan’s Clown Prince of Crime will instead be cursed with a permanent, teeth-displaying grin as a result of a congenital disease.
"He can never stop smiling. And it made Mike [Marino, prosthetic makeup designer] and I think about — I was talking about The Elephant Man because I love David Lynch. And I was like, 'Well, maybe there's something here where it's not something where he fell in a vat of chemicals or it's not the [Christopher] Nolan thing where he has these scars and we don't know where they came from. What if this is something that he's been touched by from birth and that he has a congenital disease that refuses to let him stop smiling? And he's had this very dark reaction to it, and he's had to spend a life of people looking at him in a certain way and he knows how to get into your head.'"
Taking inspiration from both The Man Who Laughs and The Elephant Man should certainly differentiate this version of The Joker from what has come before, with Keoghan’s undying smile cutting a suitably creepy figure for the mere moments that he’s on-screen in The Batman. Director Matt Reeves continued, providing some insight into the Joker’s origin and mindset.
"So [it's] this idea of him being very incisive and brilliant and being able to get into your mind and basically having this nihilistic point of view that's like from his inception, from his birth, life has been a cruel joke on him. And this is his response, and he's eventually going to declare himself as a clown, declare himself as the Joker. That was the idea."
The Joker Will Not Necessarily Be the Main Villain in The Batman 2
Despite appearing as an Easter egg, The Joker will not necessarily be the villain of The Batman sequel. In fact, star Robert Pattinson would rather see The Dark Knight go up against The Court of Owls. "I was definitely thinking Court of Owls is probably gonna be in the sequel,” the actor said, possibly revealing something he shouldn’t have. “It definitely seems like-- I mean, I am literally just guessing, I just keep saying it."
The Batman is in theaters now.