Uma Thurman Called Batman & Robin “A Fantastic Experience”

Batman & Robin star Uma Thurman says that she had a fantastic experience making the movie. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight, the actress thought back on working with director Joel Schumacher. “I was just talking about Joel Schumacher, the director who is a friend I love so much. … I loved Joel Schumacher,” she recalled. The director passed away in 2020. That moment led to a lot of fans reconsidering his work with the DC Comics franchise. With The Batman just a few months in the rear-view mirror there’s still a lot of fervor around The Dark Knight. 

Costuming seems like it was a big deal for Thurman as it was for her co-stars. The rubber nature of the Batsuits and other outfits remains a topic of conversation to this day.

“That was a fantastic experience. I had to wear lots of rubber suits,” she recalled. “I did not have a rubber mask. I had my own face. But I had some rubber appliances on my face sometimes. That was about as much rubber as I’ve ever worked with, personally.”

Batman Forever‘s costume designer Jose Fernandez recently spoke to MEL Magazine about how they came to establish these rubber looks for the heroes. While ridiculed on social media, there is a certain charm to the look of those movies.

“With Val Kilmer’s suit in Batman Forever, the nipples were one of those things that I added,” Fernandez explained. “It wasn’t fetish to me, it was more informed by Roman armor — like Centurions. And, in the comic books, the characters always looked like they were naked with spray paint on them — it was all about anatomy, and I like to push anatomy. I don’t know exactly where my head was at back in the day, but that’s what I remember. And so, I added the nipples. I had no idea there was going to end up being all this buzz about it.”

Schumacher really loved this inclusion and reportedly pushed for more prominency in George Clooney’s Batsuit. 

“Well, in the first one, they were just a little blob of clay. It was subtle — it was a blip,” the designer continued. “But for Batman & Robin, Joel Schumacher loved the nipples, so he said, ‘Let’s showcase them.’ Schumacher wanted them sharpened, like, with points. They were also circled, both outer and inner — it was all made into a feature of the Batsuit. I didn’t want to do it, but he’s the boss, so we sharpened them, circled them and it all became kind of ridiculous.”

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