Christopher Nolan has shared that he had an "initial conversation" with actor Josh Hartnett to play Batman.
Back in 2015, Hartnett revealed that he and Nolan had spoken about him taking on the role of the Caped Crusader in the director's "Batman Begins." Things didn't progress much further than those early talks, though.
"No, it never got that far," Nolan said during an appearance on the "Happy Sad Confused" podcast, when asked if he screen-tested Hartnett for the role of Batman, according to Variety. In the end, it was Christian Bale who was cast in the leading role of the film, which would launch Warner Bros.' billion-dollar grossing "Dark Knight" trilogy.
"I met with Josh and if I recall, he was a young actor whose work I was very interested in," Nolan added. "I had an initial conversation with him but he had read my brother's script for 'The Prestige' at the time and was more interested in getting involved with that. So it never went further than that."
Nearly a decade later, Hartnett teamed up with Nolan in "Oppenheimer." In the upcoming film, he portrays Ernest Lawrence, a prominent nuclear physicist and the creator of the cyclotron, who forms a close bond with J. Robert Oppenheimer during their time at the University of California, Berkeley.
In a recent Entertainment Weekly interview, Nolan revealed that Cillian Murphy, the lead in "Oppenheimer," also had a connection to his Batman universe.
Murphy had actually screen tested for the role of Batman in the past. While both Nolan and Murphy agreed that he wasn't the right fit for the iconic superhero, Nolan wanted to showcase Murphy's acting abilities to studio executives through the screen test.
"Everybody was so excited by watching you perform that when I then said to them, 'OK, Christian Bale is Batman, but what about Cillian to play Scarecrow?' There was no dissent," Nolan remembered. "All the previous Batman villains had been played by huge movie stars: Jack Nicholson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Carrey, that kind of thing. That was a big leap for them and it really was purely on the basis of that test. So that's how you got to play Scarecrow."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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