Kevin Conroy Explains Why Playing Batman in Arkham Games is So Difficult

Kevin Conroy has now been the voice of Batman for 25 years. Across multiple animated series, from Batman: The Animated Series to the upcoming Justice League Action, plus films like Batman: The Killing Joke and the Batman: Arkham video game series, Conroy and Bruce Wayne have become synonymous to friends around the world. While he enjoys exploring Batman’s world in those longer format media, coming back to an animated series has been a joy for the busy voice actor.

“It’s such a relief, let me tell you” to be working in short-form again, Conroy told Comicbook.com at San Diego Comic-Con with a smile. The eleven-minute doses of Batman in Justice League Action stand in stark contrast to something like Batman: Arkham Knight. How big of contrast? “Thirty-Six thousand lines of dialogue in Arkham Knight. Thirty-six thousand lines of dialogue,” he emphatically said. “And you record them line after line after line, alone, because with the science of how the game is built, they have to have everything completely clean and separate. So you’re alone for days at a time, eight hours a day, line after line after line, trying to keep the character fresh, trying to keep the line readings fresh, trying to keep your voice in the right place. And doing it all with no feedback from Mark Hamill, or Diedrich Bader, or any other actors. You’re doing it alone! It’s so hard. By the end of the week, I’m just dead. And it’s not as fulfilling as acting in the episodic shows, because those are like little plays, you have interaction with the other actors and it’s so much fun. Games, the fulfillment is in seeing the games at the end, because they’re fantastic. They’re beautiful works of art, and you feel so proud to be a part of them. But the actual process of building them is brutal.”

The actor jumps now into Justice League Action, where the aforementioned Mark Hamill also returns as The Joker, and Diedrich Bader – himself a veteran voice of the Batman – returns to the DCU, this time as Booster Gold. It will premiere on Cartoon Network Fall 2016.