Robert Pattinson on Trying on the Batsuit for The Batman

Now that Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker made its startling debut at the Venice Film Festival, the era of a whole new Gotham is upon us. You can include Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson’s upcoming The Batman as part of a brand new look at DC’s reigning champs, supervillain and superhero, respectively. While Joker will be hitting theaters on October 4, we won’t know what kind of Gotham Reeves and Pattinson have conjured up for quite some time; The Batman isn’t due in theaters until June 25, 2021. Yet that doesn’t mean we can start to speculate. In fact, Variety got a chance to speak to Pattinson (he’s currently doing press for his upcoming film The Lighthouse) about taking on the role of the Caped Crusader.

Pattinson admits that he’s actually been thinking about the role for a long time. He’d heard that Reeves was working on a script in which Bruce Wayne would be a bit younger, and he was intrigued.

“I’d had Batman in my mind for a while. It’s such an absurd thing to say. I sort of had an idea to do it, and I’d been prodding Matt. He didn’t accept any prods. I kept asking to meet him.”

When Reeves did finish the script, he finally agreed to meet with Pattinson in Los Angeles:

“And then I had to kind of try to imagine what he’d written, and I hadn’t even read the script,” Pattinson told Variety. “I’d come with this pad full of notes.”

Pattinson headed to Cannes in May for The Lighthouse, at which point it was leaked he was in the running for the role. He told Variety the leak was terrifying. He’d only just begun reading Reeves’ script.

Then came the intense auditioning for the role, in which he was going against Nicholaus Hoult. This was when he got to try on the Batsuit for the first time:

“I put it on. I remember saying to Matt, ‘It does feel quite transformative!…You do feel very powerful immediately. And it’s pretty astonishing, something that is incredibly difficult to get into, so the ritual of getting into it is pretty humiliating. You’ve got five people trying to shove you into something. Once you’ve got it on, it’s like, ‘Yeah, I feel strong, I feel tough, even though I had to have someone squeezing my butt cheeks into the legs.’… You’re trying to think of the way to balance, how to bring something new to it and not want to scare people off, and work in the confines of the costume.”

Pattison found out the role was his in a very fortunate setting; he was working on Christopher Nolan’s new film Tenet. You couldn’t ask to be around a more perfect person to discuss bringing something fresh to Batman with, considering Nolan ushered in a new era of serious superhero films with his 2005 game-changer Batman Begins.

Featured image: PARIS, FRANCE – JANUARY 20: Robert Pattinson attends Dior Homme Menswear Fall/Winter 2018-2019 show as part of Paris Fashion Week at Grand Palais on January 20, 2018 in Paris, France. (Photo by Francois Durand/Getty Images for Dior Homme)