Batman: Caped Crusader will take Batman fans back to Bruce Timm’s animated Noir world that mixes classic Batman tropes with a modern edge. However, the era of Batman: The Animated Series has passed with the death of iconic Batman voice actor Kevin Conroy; now a new actor is answering the call to voice Batman for a new generation. Hamish Linklater for his roles in the Netflix religious-horror series Midnight Mass, and his anti-mutant antagonist Clark Debussy in FX’s X-Men spinoff Legion. Linklater made his public debut as the new Batman at San Diego Comic-Con 2024, and there was one subject we had to ask about:
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How did Hamish Linklater come up with his new Batman voice?
There will inevitably be comparisons between Hamish Linklater’s and Kevin Conroy’s respective performances as Batman – and that’s fair. Batman: Caped Crusader feels very much like a spiritual successor to Batman: The Animated Series, and even Linklater admitted that Conroy’s iconic voice was an inescapable influence:
“Well, I mean, I was obsessed with the animated show and Kevin Conroy. And I think – even though when I was making my audition tape, I certainly wasn’t trying to copy him – but those vibrations were [there], that sound was in my head, and that was, I think, probably what I was pursuing.”
Like Conroy, Linklater creates two very different vocal personas between “Bruce Wayne” and “Batman.” However, Linklater’s “Batman” is much more exact and monotone in his cadence and delivery, creating an almost disturbing human/robot dichotomy between the two personas. Linklater talked about working with Bruce Timm to capture the ethos of who Batman is and getting some deeply insightful point of view on the character:
“I’ve got to say that I’m less of… what’s become known as a method actor, and more of a sort of outside-in guy. So when it sounded right in the audition, then I’m like, ‘Oh, I wonder where I went to make that sound… And then Bruce [Timm] had this great thing, which was like, ‘The guy is Batman: Bruce Wayne is the alter-ego – is the mask. That’s the invention.’ So that was sort of the order of business, I think.
the moment when he knew he’d found his Bamtan voice – and all the struggle it took to get there:
“This is my first real voiceover acting job that I’ve been hired for. I’ve auditioned a lot – very badly. This one, for some reason… I got the audition. I went and sat in a freezing cold car in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I just recorded the lines over and over and over again, far more than I’d ever done for any other audition because I had this sort of voice that I was like, ‘I’ve got to get it.’ I hate listening to myself, but for this one, for whatever reason, I played it back over and over and over again until it was as close as I was going to get. So it was really, I did it for myself because I never thought I was going to get hired because I’d never been hired before for voiceover work. So that was it. I mean, I don’t know. I was chasing a ghost.”
It was brought up that Kevin Conroy became the voice of Batman for an entire generation of Batman fans – in animated shows, movies, video games, audiobooks, etc. Linklater made it clear that he’s more than ready to step up and take on many other Batman-themed projects after Caped Crusader:
“I’m so thrilled to have been asked to do what I’ve been asked to do, and I’ll do whatever they asked me to do in this field,” Linklater said in no uncertain terms. “I mean, it’s a total privilege. It’s such a privilege. So I hope they ask me to do more. For sure.”
Batman: Caped Crusader premieres on Amazon Prime Video on Thursday, August 1st.
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