The Dark Knight Rises Star Didn’t Read Script to Avoid Spoilers

Only a handful of characters appeared in every entry in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and amongst those characters is Jonathan Crane’s Scarecrow, as portrayed by Cillian Murphy. The role largely helped launch Murphy’s career after the actor was able to find himself in Nolan’s inner circle with the role, and will now appear in the filmmaker’s Oppenheimer biopic this summer. Having appeared in two of Nolan’s superhero features by the time The Dark Knight Rises rolled around, Murphy recently revealed he didn’t want to spoil himself and read the script to the threequel before shooting.

“I remember when you called, you said, ‘You want to read the script?’” Murphy said in a new interview with Nolan in Entertainment Weekly. “And I said, ‘You know what, I don’t actually want to read the script. Just tell me what I’m doing, just tell me what my motivation is, and then I want to see the movie,’ I didn’t want to spoil it. So I just came in for that one day, did that little bit on that amazing set, and then waited to see the movie. And it was worth it.”

Was Cillian Murphy going to play Batman?

As it turns out, Murphy and Nolan first met when the former was auditioning for the role for Bruce Wayne. After losing out to Christian Bale, Nolan did whatever he could to make sure Murphy was a part of the franchise.

“When we had our first conversation I think both of us knew that you weren’t going to wind up playing Batman. But I really wanted to get on set with you, I wanted to get you on film,” Nolan recalled in the same interview. “We did those screen tests very elaborately, on 35mm, with a little set. There was just an electric atmosphere in the crew when you started to perform. We did two scenes – there was a Bruce Wayne scene and a Batman scene.”

He added, “I made sure that executives came down and watched what you were doing on set. Everybody was so excited by watching you perform that when I then said to them, “Okay, Christian Bale is Batman, but what about Cillian to play Scarecrow?” there was no dissent. All the previous Batman villains had been played by huge movie stars: Jack Nicholson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Carrey, that kind of thing. That was a big leap for them and it really was purely on the basis of that test. So that’s how you got to play Scarecrow.”

Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is now streaming on HBO Max.