The villains of The Batman explain their characters

Warner Bros. and director Matt Reeves are back with yet another reboot of the Batman franchise, this time with Robert Pattinson under the cape and cowl.

But Batman is only half the equation. Plenty of people show up for the villains, and The Batman is full to bursting with them, starting with Zoe Kravitz as Catwoman.

“I really wanted to dive into who she is as a human being,” actor Zoë Kravitz explained to Empire. “There’s a great moment where you see she has all these tons of cats, and I really wanted to dive into the psychology of that. Why does she have all these cats? And when you see the film, you’ll see it’s completely connected to who she is as a human being. Oftentimes, when an actor wants a part, we tend to just nod and smile and say yes to everything. But I tried to do something a little different, for me anyway, which was to treat it as though I already had the part and give notes, so Matt could really get a sense of what it’s like to work with me.”

But Catwoman is more of an antihero and unreliable ally for Batman than is a villain, or at least that looks like it’ll be her role in this movie. The main threat is a villain who’s sometime treated as a joke: the Riddler, here played by Paul Dano as a Zodiac Killer-like psychopath who leaves cryptic clues at his grisly crime scenes.

Rather than bearing the sorta campy moniker of Edward Nygma, this version of the Riddler goes by the name Edward Ashton. Also speaking to Empire, Dano sounded very impressed with the script and the direction from Matt Reeves. “I was surprised by it and frankly thought it was better than it had any right to be,” he said. “As well as making contact with the universe, the archetype, the world, the fans, Matt’s delivering something that comes from a real place of gut and heart and psychology.”

As for the Riddler’s leaving-clues-at-the-crime-scene schtick, Dano said it comes from “trauma,” which could position the Riddler as mirroring Bruce Wayne, who was also traumatized as a child. “Some can use that fire for good, and some can use it for something else.”

Both Catwoman and the Riddler get a lot of screentime in a newly released trailer. Watch below:

Colin Farrell wants to explore the Penguin in “the second film”

The one villain who doesn’t show up in the trailer is the Penguin, aka Oswald Cobblepot, played by Colin Farrell. Both Farrell and Reeves compared him to Fredo from The Godfather movies.

“There is a fracture at the core of Oz, which fuels his desire and ambition to rise within this criminal cabal,” Farrell said. “Where that rise goes… I would love to get to explore that in the second film, if that was ever to happen.”

"There’s no top hat [in the movie]. There is one scene where I have an umbrella in my hand, but it doesn’t have a trigger on the handle. He does have a limping gait, so there is somewhat of a waddle there. But Oz is not yet fully inhabiting the mythology of the Penguin and doesn’t take too kindly to the monicker."

Sometime tells me that a second film will happen.

The Batman is out in theaters on March 4, 2022.

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h/t SyFy Wire