The Batman Actor Never Matters

I make an exception when it comes to TV Batman actors, because in that case we’re talking about long term casting and performances for media coming out on a regular basis, rather than one blockbuster every few years.

In these latter cases, I don’t even understand when people ask “who’s your favorite Batman?”

Who cares?

When I saw Tim Burton’s Batman eight times in the theater, it had nothing to do with Michael Keaton’s performance as Batman, and everything to do with Jack Nicholson’s contagiously hilarious performance as the Joker.

When I watch 2007’s The Dark Knight, it isn’t Christian Bale’s fight scenes I’m tempted to fast forward to, it’s Heath Ledger as the Joker in the GCPD interrogation room, or later when he crashes Harvey Dent’s hospital room.

If you love Batman Returns, it isn’t the lead actor who you remember best—it’s Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman or Danny DeVito as the Penguin. If you love Batman Forever and try to convince anyone it doesn’t have more to do with Jim Carrey as The Riddler than anything else, you’re a big fibber and there’s nothing else to it.

This always comes up when I hear someone trashing George Clooney for 1997’s Batman & Robin.

Is Batman & Robin a horrible movie? Absolutely. Does what’s horrible about Batman & Robin have anything to do with Clooney or any other actor? No.

Do you think George Clooney insisted his costume include rubber nipples? He didn’t.

Do you think it was the Batman & Robin actor who insisted all the gangs in Gotham City would be scarier if they were covered in dayglo body paint? Because it wasn’t.

Do you suspect George Clooney pulled Joel Schumacher aside and insisted the director take Bane—arguably the most brutally intimidating Batman villain of all time—and turn him into a glorified henchman with less dialogue than Darth Maul? Nope, that wasn’t him.

You blame George Clooney for everything that was bad about Batman & Robin because he was the top-billed actor, but the dude didn’t direct the movie, he didn’t design the movie, and he sure didn’t write it.

No one has fewer kind words to say about Zack Snyder’s DC films than I, but to blame anything I don’t like about the movies on Ben Affleck’s Batman or any other actor would be ridiculous.

Ben Affleck is a fine Batman actor who was cast in terrible movies.

Is it Affleck who insisted Batman kill more people? Did he hire men to break into Snyder’s home and threaten to break his legs if he didn’t make the Batman/Superman throw-down the slowest, most visually uninteresting superhero fight in the history of cinema? When Snyder hit the slo-mo button, did Affleck stand behind him, screaming in his ear like a Kylo Ren meme, “More! MORE!”

No. The lead actor doesn’t do everything in a movie, guys. If he did, he’d probably be paid less.

The only Batman movies we have in which the Batman actor really matters all that much are 2005’s Batman Begins and 2022’s The Batman. Those films are the exceptions because we either aren’t meant to know who the villain is for most of the film, or we don’t see the villain’s face for most of it. Because of that, the Batman actor is carrying a lot more of the film than usual.

But that’s it. In every other live-action solo Batman film, your appreciation is tied directly to your enjoyment of the villain. If you hate The Dark Knight Rises, you hate Tom Hardy’s Bane. If you love Batman Forever, you love Jim Carrey’s Riddler.

I don’t want to go so far as to say Batman actors are a dime a dozen, but the truth is, as long as you’re a dude within a certain (fairly wide) age-range, playing Batman isn’t all that tough. The hardest part is probably figuring out how to move your neck.