With the number of interpretations of Batman that audiences have seen over the years, it can be hard to find unique ways to bring the Caped Crusader to life, which presented The Batman star Robert Pattinson with a number of challenges. When it came to thinking outside of the box, Pattinson concocted a number of ambitious approaches to the character, though there were a few choices he explored that he would quickly realize weren’t the right approach, whether that be his vocal decisions, loungewear, or fighting styles. The Batman is set to be landing in theaters on March 4th.
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“I found out a funny thing about it, because I wanted to do a radically different thing to all the other Batman and started in a … I just thought, because everyone does this gruff, gravelly thing, and I thought, ‘I’m gonna do the opposite. I’m gonna do really whispery,’” Pattinson shared with Jimmy Kimmel Live! about developing the character’s voice. “And I tried to do it for the first two weeks and it just looked absolutely atrocious and they told me to stop doing it. But then I found out from Nick, who was putting me in the suit every day, that’s what Christian Bale did on Batman Begins, as well, and if you listen to the first Batman Begins teaser trailer, you can hear the original voice. I only found this out a couple of weeks ago.”
He added, “You can feel when it feels right. There’s something, when you put the suit on, and you have to speak a certain way.”
Director and co-writer Matt Reeves has been drawing comparisons between Bruce Wayne and Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain for quite some time, with Pattinson noting that he wanted to embrace some of the former frontman’s more eccentric elements for scenes when Bruce is seemingly alone in Wayne Manor.
“One of the first things that Matt said to me is that, ‘He’s sort of inspired by Kurt Cobain.’ And I’m like, ‘Really? That’s kind of the opposite of what I imagined Bruce Wayne to be,’” the actor recalled. “The first costume meetings, I wanted to go really, really, really Kurt Cobain and wanted to wear a dressing gown and fluffy, Bugs Bunny slippers, really grungy, and we tried that and it didn’t work at all.”
With Pattinson’s co-star Zoë Kravitz playing Catwoman, she looked to the animal kingdom for inspiration on her character’s physicality, but when Pattinson took a similar approach to research, the results weren’t nearly as impressive.
“There was one thing I said to Matt, because I was talking to ZoëKravitz, who plays Catwoman, she’s great, and she was saying, to see the way she’s moving and stuff, she’s looking at these videos, big cat videos, and how big cats fight and stuff,” Pattinson pointed out. “So I looked up how a bat fights and there was this one video on Planet Earth of the technique of a vampire bat with a chicken in a cage and how it fights the chicken, it flaps around the cage for like an hour, just flap-banging on the cage until the chicken’s been scared for so long the chicken falls asleep. And then the bat sneaks into the cage and bites it on its anus. I said that to Matt, and he’s like, ‘I’ve got an idea.’”
The Batman lands in theaters on March 4th.
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