Gotham Producer Confirms Mr. Freeze Coming to the Series

Batman villain Mr. Freeze will appear on Gotham, executive producer Danny Cannon tells Digital Spy.

Cannon, who directed the series' pilot, had previously said that he had hoped to incorporate the classic rogue into the series.

"Without giving too much away - because I'm not allowed to - the great thing about working on a CSI procedural show for so long was we worked with so many experts - specialists in each field," Cannon said, who added that he tried to internalize as many of those stories as he could.

"My first conversation with [showrunner] Bruno Heller about the villains in this show is always that they need to be very credible and relatable and the science behind them needs to be real, so I had a couple of stories that I'd held onto - real, true stories - and one of them just related to Mr Freeze. I know a real way to create an origin story."

It sounds, then, as if the character won't stay Victor Fries indefinitely and may become more supervillain-esque  during the series. The idea of Batman's villains having origins that predate his own is one of the things that hardcore fans of the comics have been concerned about with regard to Gotham's prequel approach.

We already know that Edward "The Riddler" Nygma, Selina "Catwoman" Kyle, Harvey "Two-Face" Dent and Oswald "The Penguin" Cobblepot will appear on the series. Ivy Pepper, apparently replacing Pamela Eisley as the Poison Ivy of the Gothamverse, will also appear.

Freeze made numerous appearances on the 1966 Batman TV series, played first by by George Sanders and later by Otto Preminger and Eli Wallach. In 1997's Batman & Robin, the character was played by former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.