Pennyworth’s Ben Aldridge Has Asked Producers About Thomas Wayne As Flashpoint Batman

Ben Aldridge, who plays Thomas Wayne on the upcoming EPIX drama Pennyworth, would love to have a shot at the role of Flashpoint‘s Batman, and told ComicBook.com at Comic Con International in San Diego this weekend that he has already dropped a few hints about it with showrunner Bruno Heller — not that Heller, who after years on Gotham is likely pretty used to actors making such suggestions, was seemingly all that fazed by the request.

In Flashpoint, a comic series by Geoff Johns and Andy Kubert, Joe Chill’s mugging of Thomas and Martha Wayne went catastrophically wrong, killing their son Bruce and driving each of the parents past their breaking points in different ways. While Martha becomes The Joker, Thomas becomes a grim, gun-toting Batman. That character, who worked with Barry Allen to rewrite reality and repair the DC Universe’s timeline, managed to survive the end of the Flashpoint universe and has been working with Bane in the current Batman comic by Tom King. During the press line for Pennyworth at Comic Con, we asked Aldridge whether he would like to play that version of Thomas down the line.

“Yes, where I get to be the badass,” Aldridge said. “Yes, of course I would! I’ve mentioned it to Bruno [Heller] a couple of times and he’s just laughed at me, so I don’t know, but we get to see a darker version fo Thomas Wayne for sure in this. It’s not all upstanding citizen. We see elements of Batman’s darkness that live within him, and we see glimpses of that throughout our series, so that’s a good thing to look out for, actually.”

In Pennyworth, Thomas is the subject of an assassination attempt in the pilot, and hires Alfred Pennyworth to provide him with personal security as a result. He, along with Martha Kane, will become major parts of Wayne’s life, right up to the point where he (presumably) returns to Gotham City in the series finale.

Pennyworth comes from executive producers Danny Cannon and Bruno Heller, best known for the long-running FOX series Gotham. The series follows Bruce Wayne’s legendary butler, Alfred Pennyworth (Jack Bannon), a former British SAS soldier in his 20s, who forms a security company and goes to work with young billionaire Thomas Wayne (Ben Aldridge), who’s not yet Bruce’s father, in 1960s London.

Pennyworth is set to premiere on Epix on Sunday, July 28th.