Warner Bros wanted Leonardo DiCaprio to play Riddler in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises
Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning career-defining portrayal of The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 superhero film The Dark Knight was surely a tough act to follow for any Batman villain.
In a new podcast Happy Sad Confused, screenwriter David S Goyer has revealed that Warner Bros was considering to cast Leonardo DiCaprio as Riddler in The Dark Knight Rises (2012).
David’s revelation
David recalled in the podcast that an executive of Warner Bros, the production house that bankrolled the Dark Knight franchise, suggested to him at the premiere of The Dark Knight that Leonardo DiCaprio should be cast as another Batman antagonist, Riddler, in the next instalment.
However, David gunned down that thought even before it reached Nolan, the director. He said, “Chris is very process-driven. I had a sense of when the Spider-Man movies or the superhero movies started getting made, the studios started asking, ‘Okay, who’s our villain in the next movie going to be?’ And let’s go around that. Chris was staunchly against that because that’s not a bottom ground-up way of telling the story. Let’s do it in a very naturalistic way. Let’s figure out the story we want to tell, what thematically we want to explore with Bruce (Wayne aka Batman), and let’s figure out a villain that fits that story.”
About Dark Knight franchise
Christopher Nolan started his interpretation of Batman with Batman Begins in 2005. His franchise starred Christian Bale as the titular character. The first part was followed by The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, that concluded the franchise. Tom Hardy played the villain Bane in the final part.
Batman is now being reimagined into a new franchise. Matt Reeves directed the first instalment of that, The Batman, last year with Robert Pattinson as the caped crusader. Before that, Ben Affleck played Batman in Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman (2016), all the way till The Flash this year.
Interestingly, Nolan and Leonardo did work together a couple of years after The Dark Knight in the 2010 sci-fi thriller Inception.