OK, this comes from Hollywood Life. Who? The gossipy sister site of Deadline Hollywood and Movieline (owned by the same mega conglomerate). We’re reporting this because…well, it seems potentially plausible.
Is Joseph Gordon-Levitt in early discussions to play The Riddler in Christopher Nolan’s “Batman 3”? One thing is for sure, the script by Jonathan “Jonah” Nolan is not complete so nothing’s been set in stone, but we can believe that some early discussions could have been made.
Here’s some reasons why. As we wrote when “Batman 3″ was first officially announced, “we do like the Riddler , if only because there’s a serial killer-like quality to his character that you can ground in reality, whereas transposing silly characters to the screen like the Penguin or Mr. Freeze is something Nolan and company generally know better than to attempt.”
Nolan tends to be loyal to his actors too and we wrote, “We wouldn’t be surprised if key members of the ‘Inception’ cast — folks like Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy — turn up in the [‘Batman 3’] film somewhere.”
However, “Batman 3” (obviously its working title only) isn’t scheduled to hit theaters until July 2012. That’s two summers away, so if there is any grain of truth to Hollywood Life’s report at all, it’s likely just those early “wouldn’t it be cool if…” talks. The gossip site says “Batman 3” and JGL’s involvement was a running joke on the “Inception” set and we can believe that. Also, the young actor is also evidently a big part of the story and has a major role in the picture. Still, take this one with a grain of salt for now. But as we said, we do hope and expect to see the Riddler, since Nolan’s grounded/believable super hero milieu seems to work far above most of the classic, but very cartoony Batman arch enemies that would never seem to play in that world.
Update: Gordon-Levitt’s reps have denied this. We expected as much, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen… one day. Who knows, we’re not saying we bought it either, but again, we have our reasons listed above why we didn’t think this news was as ridiculous as the Eddie Murphy rumors that was just positively ludicrous.
