Shane West finally makes his long-awaited debut on Gotham this week, where he plays Eduardo Dorrance, the ex-military leader of a strike team sent into the city to help Jim Gordon. Of course, we all know that Dorrance is much more than that, as it has been confirmed that West’s character will go on to become the infamous Batman villain, Bane.
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While the actual Bane character won’t be arriving for another couple of episodes, the first look at Gotham‘s version of the villain surfaced last year while the season was in production. To say it was met with mixed reactions would be an understatement. However, West is convinced that Gotham fans will absolutely love Bane when he finally dons the mask.
Ahead of this week’s episode, ComicBook.com had a chance to chat with West about his Gotham debut, and the actor told us that his take on Bane will be vastly different from those seen in the past.
“What they did in Chris Nolan’s version I thought was a very cool idea,” West began. “We do our own take on that with the mask which I personally absolutely love. You find out quickly, you’ve already seen one of the episodes, that this is something a little obviously different. It kinda grows into this. When he grows into this, you’ll see that he needs the mask. It’s not just the venom that’s coursing through his veins to pump him up and kind of keep him going. It’s almost, in our version, it’s he needs the mask to also breathe and live. It’s kind of more of a deformed, steampunk version of Eduardo Dorrance.”
As West continued, he explained that this new Bane is completely in the spirit of Gotham. Since he’s quite a bit older than Bruce Wayne, he will find rivalries in some of Gotham’s other heroes.
“With this idea, I personally loved it because it was so unique and that’s obviously the whole kind of concept of the pilot of Gotham and the whole concept of the series but I did know it being so dramatically different, I’m sure there will be people that don’t like it,” he added. “It’s like okay, what can we do, since this is the way we’re gonna do it, this is the way you’re gonna do it, I’m just the actor, what can we do to make this as realistic as possible? How many Easter eggs can we throw in there to tease the fans of it potentially going a different direction? We’ve already done something different with Gotham where half the villains are clearly older than Bruce Wayne. Once Bruce Wayne would be a full on adult and be actually Batman, all the villains would be a lot older but that’s something that Gotham always wanted to do. That’s what they started with one day one. Obviously, Bane can’t be fighting Batman currently because he’s not Batman. What do you do? Okay, why not be, how do we make him still be something viable? Okay, how about he transforms into it in a different way? He was supposed to be Jim Gordon and GCPD story in the beginning, so let’s have him be one of those guys that went across the wayside that was kind friendly with Jim, they served together, but Jim was never quite sure with him because he was never a great guy to begin with. If you start off with that Bane was never a great guy to begin with or that Dorrance was never a great guy to begin with and you, as you’ll see and as the viewers will see what ends up happening later, you’ll that he’s transition into Bane will make a ton of sense.”
Are you think forward to Bane’s arrival on Gotham? Let us know in the comments!
