With an Oscar and a slew of high-profile roles under his belt, Eddie Redmayne is someone that fans have been eager to see enter some sort of comic book franchise. While Redmayne has been “fancast” in roles for years, it sounds like there’s one character who he’d be more than willing to play. When asked by IMDB what supervillain he’d like to play, Redmayne responded that he’d love to play Batman villain Edward Nygma/The Riddler.
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“I’d love to play The Riddler.” The Fantastic Beasts and Jupiter Ascending star revealed. “Just putting that out there.”
The Riddler has been among the popular fancasts for Redmayne for several years now, as well as Blue Beetle and Mister Fantastic. The actor has toed with the possibility of playing a comic book movie character in the past, reportedly auditioning for Guardians of the Galaxy‘s Star-Lord and The Amazing Spider-Man 2‘s Harry Osborne.
“I have been a fan.” Redmayne said of comic book movies in a 2012 interview. “I go and see those films and the ones are good I absolutely love, and the ones that aren’t I don’t so much. But having seen things like Andrew and Emma’s performance in Spider-Man, you know it’s often that the scale of the pieces can make an audience think that there’s so much going on that you sort of forget that there are brilliant things being done by the actors in the middle of it. And same thing with The Avengers and I’m lucky enough to have worked with some of these actors and some of them are friends. And so you do go in from an actor’s point of view scrutinizing that. and I think through The Dark Knight Rises and all these other films there’s is a weightiness that is being given to these pieces now that, for me, is so much more extraordinary than when they felt more light.”
While there’s no telling if and when Redmayne will ever get to play The Riddler, there could be an opportunity for the character to return to the big screen in The Batman. Early reports have indicated that Riddler could be one of the villains in the Robert Pattinson-led film, although time will tell if that’s ultimately the case.
“It’s very much a point of view-driven, noir Batman tale. It’s told very squarely on his shoulders, and I hope it’s going to be a story that will be thrilling but also emotional,” The Batman writer-director Matt Reeves said in an interview earlier this year. “It’s more Batman in his detective mode than we’ve seen in the films. The comics have a history of that. He’s supposed to be the world’s greatest detective, and that’s not necessarily been a part of what the movies have been. I’d love this to be one where when we go on that journey of tracking down the criminals and trying to solve a crime, it’s going to allow his character to have an arc so that he can go through a transformation.”
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