It looks like Robert Pattinson’s Batman is getting a new friend in the Gotham City Police Department and one potential enemy around town. Luckily for him, the former is an Emmy and Golden Globe award-winner. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that Warner Bros is in negotiations with Westworld star Jeffrey Wright to portray Jim Gordon, the eternal ally to the Caped Crusader, in The Batman. No matter the era in his life, Gordon is always on the Bat’s side either as a lone trustworthy detective in a crooked town or as the newly minted police commissioner determined to root out corruption. Variety, meanwhile, reports Jonah Hill is being eyed for a mysterious villain role.
While it’s currently unclear which stage in his career Wright’s Gordon would be, if cast he would be joining an already impressive creative team that’s spearheaded by writer-director Matt Reeves in what is at least a soft Dark Knight reboot. Currently known as The Batman, the new superhero movie stars Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne and is expected to be a stark departure to how the character was portrayed by Ben Affleck in Zack Snyder’s two Batman movies.
The latter of them, Justice League, briefly featured J.K. Simmons as Commissioner Gordon, which he portrayed in the kind of classical bumbling fashion that Pat Hingle memorably essayed during the 1980s and ‘90s Batman films. However, the most famous Gordon to date remains Gary Oldman, who portrayed Jim’s rise from lowly beat cop to driven police commissioner and resistance leader in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.
Hill, by contrast, has apparently been in talks with WB since before Pattinson was cast as Batman. According to Variety, WB began discussions with the Oscar-nominated actor for an unspecified villainous role – if we were taking bets we’d guess the Penguin, although many are pegging him as The Riddler – but negotiations were tabled until after Batman himself was cast. Now that Pattinson is behind the mask, discussions are beginning again between the studio and actor.
Genre fans have of course become comfortable with Wright as of late, notably for his work on Westworld where he plays one of the key personnel in charge of creating the robots of that sci-fi dystopia… one with a lot of secrets. He also portrayed Hunger Games champion Beetee in the Hunger Games films and Bond’s CIA pal Felix Leiter in Daniel Craig’s 007 movies Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace (he’ll be reprising that role in the upcoming No Time To Die, too).
Hill, of course, is famous for the R-rated comedies that made him a household name, including Superbad and This Is The End. However, Hill has transitioned to more serious fare beginning with his Oscar-nominated work in Moneyball, which he followed up with another Academy Award nod in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street. More recently, he starred alongside Emma Stone in Cary Fukunaga’s trippy miniseries, Maniac, and made his directorial debut with Mid90s.
The Batman is due to start filming in early 2020 and is scheduled for release on 25 June 2021.
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