**Spoilers for “The Batman” below. You’ve been warned.**
For those who have seen “The Batman” in theaters, you are probably aware there isn’t some grand post-credits scene that teases what’s to come in the franchise. However, in a scene right near the end, we are given a moment in Arkham Asylum between Paul Dano’s The Riddler and an “unnamed Arkham prisoner.” Well, in a new interview with IGN, Matt Reeves breaks down exactly who that prisoner is and why that scene is done in that way.
Yes, it’s the Joker. And yes, like all of the rumors assumed, the Joker of the Matt Reeves ‘Batman’ franchise is played by “Eternals” actor Barry Keoghan. But according to the filmmaker, the quick scene where Joker is hidden behind a door wasn’t the only moment that would feature the villain in the film. Reeves said there was a much bigger scene during the early part of the film that would have given us a peek into this proto-Joker character.
“The reason Joker is in the movie is that there was another scene that was earlier,” said Reeves. “The scene that was not in the movie, the scene that this was a companion to…it’s a scene where Batman is so unnerved because the Riddler is writing to him and he’s like, ‘Why is this guy writing to me?’ Because he has to profile this killer, and he goes to see another killer that he’s clearly had an experience with, in these first two years. And the killer in this story is not yet the character that we come to know. So everyone is in their kind of infancy.”
He added, “In the scene that you will see in the future, you will see what he looked like and he’s kinda held in this very suspenseful way away from you visually. I wanted to create an iteration of him that felt distinctive and new but right back to the roots. He’s kinda right out of the Conrad Veidt sort of mold. That idea, in the silent film, ‘The Man Who Laughs,’ he’s got this congenital disease that he can never stop smiling. It’s not something where he felt in a vat of chemicals or it’s not the Nolan thing with these scars that we don’t know where they came from. What if this is something he’s been touched by since birth?”
Obviously, that deleted scene has heavy inspiration from “Silence of the Lambs,” but with a Joker spin. He describes this iteration of Joker as an “early-days version” of the character who hasn’t fully embraced his Clown Prince of Crime moniker. Reeves thinks the congenital disease of a persistent smile would lead him to think that “life is a joke” and therefore, he becomes a clown.
The filmmaker isn’t sure this will lead to anything in the future, but he wanted to lay the groundwork for the character anyway. We’ll have to wait and see how fans react to this new version of Joker, especially so quickly after we saw Joaquin Phoenix put an entirely new spin on the character just a couple of years ago.
“The Batman” is in theaters now. You can see the whole interview below: