NOTE: The following post contains SPOILERS for The Batman.
The Riddler threw a lot of mysteries at Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne in The Batman, but none were quite as puzzling as his very last scene in the movie, which featured Paul Dano’s Riddler and an “Unseen Arkham Prisoner” — that’s how he was officially credited in the film — speaking about Batman and Gotham City and the start of a budding friendship. The unseen prisoner was played by Barry Keoghan, one of the film’s top-billed stars who doesn’t appear in the rest of The Batman.
The unseen character’s dialogue and menacing laugh suggest he might be this Batman universe’s version of the Joker, and in interviews around the release of The Batman, director Matt Reeves confirmed that was who the character was meant to be. He also revealed that originally Keoghan’s character appeared in another scene that was eventually cut from the final release. In that deleted scene, Batman tries to “profile” the Riddler by visiting “another killer that he’s clearly had an experience with in these first two years” who Reeves described as “a Joker who’s not yet the Joker.”
Now that deleted scene has debuted online, featuring Robert Pattison and Keoghan in a sequence that is very reminiscent to the dynamic in The Silence of the Lambs between Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, with the young and inexperienced crime fighter asking for advice from the menacing yet insightful psychopath. This “Arkham Prisoner” mostly remains in the blurry background, but you do get a better sense of him than in the final film; he has patchy green hair and a brutally scarred face and mouth. He sort of looks like Heath Ledger’s Joker if he’d been even more horrifically beaten.
Take a look at the scene below:
While this scene would have made that last scene between Riddler and the sort-of Joker make more sense, I am glad this was cut. It is very long, at five minutes all by itself, and it really doesn’t add anything of consequence to the story. The Joker doesn’t give Batman a necessary clue or hint, and all it does it tease an appearance by a character who is totally irrelevant. Personally, I probably would have cut both Joker scenes, but that’s just me.
The Batman is still playing exclusively in theaters.
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