Enigmatic Riddler gets creepy makeover
Character actor Paul Dano puts his own stamp on a classic DC villain in ‘The Batman’
Spoiler alert: The following post contains light spoilers for “The Batman” so beware if you want to go in totally cold.
As soon as you see Paul Dano’s new Riddler in “The Batman” — masked up and standing eerily still in the shadows before clobbering the mayor of Gotham City in the head with a carpet tucking tool — it’s creepily apparent this isn’t the giggly king of conundrums played on screen in the past by Jim Carrey and Frank Gorshin.
Dano was excited about the “risk of a totally new take” on an iconic comic-book villain, the actor says, and “it was a little scary as well, just for like a minute at the outset where you go, ‘Whoa!’ “
In director Matt Reeves’ “The Batman” (in theatres now), the Caped Crusader (Robert Pattinson) is in his second year of fighting crime in Gotham City when the Riddler shows up. This mysterious serial killer eyes Gotham power players for his kill list and leaves cyphers and puzzles addressed to Batman at each murder scene, viewing the Dark Knight as an inspiration of sorts.
As Riddler’s real game becomes clearer, he develops a popular following livestreaming his violent antics to Gothamites sick of institutional corruption. Batman might be the masked vigilante doing good for the city, but some view the Riddler in a similar light.
“A lot of superhero films, the morality in them is very black and white. There’s not often a lot of gray, which I think there is in life, and (the characters are) often protecting the status quo,” Dano explains. In this film, Batman and Riddler are actually challenging that.”
The Riddler’s green jacket — adorned with question marks — is evocative of past iterations, including Gorshin in the 1960s “Batman” TV show and Carrey in 1995’s “Batman Forever.” What’s new is a combat mask paired with glasses, and Dano worked with a “mask guru” to flesh out a character “who probably felt a lot of shame or self-hatred or pain,” Dano says. “The mask allows for you to be either somebody else or to be a different version of yourself.”
While the mask “became very powerful,” it already wasn’t the easiest to work with when Dano decided to use plastic wrap on his head under the mask to get more into the mind-set of a criminal character concerned about leaving DNA behind (although the audience never gets to see it). “If I wasn’t gonna shave every hair off of my body, I thought, well, let’s make sure there’s no traces of evidence to be found. So I taped off wrists and used Saran Wrap, and that was quite suffocating and painful and hot and head-throbbing. I would not recommend it for any Halloween costume.”
And when that mask comes off, Dano’s sinister Riddler is revealed as a man named Edward Nashton, who’s taken into custody at a Gotham diner and interrogated by Batman, and the villain lashes out with spitting fury.
“The hope was that the more real this person was, the scarier that it actually might be,” Dano says.
The Riddler isn’t the only popculture icon he’s played on screen: Dano also starred as Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson in the 2014 musical biopic “Love & Mercy.”
When inhabiting legendary characters, “the stakes always feel pretty high just because you want to climb the mountain and do your best,” Dano says. “Playing Brian Wilson was one of the best times I’ve had as an actor because the music just gave me so much joy in return. They were both daunting and challenging experiences that now I look at with a lot of fondness.”
Another fun fact: “The Batman” turned him into a comic-book fan. While indie favourite Dano (“There Will Be Blood,” “Little Miss Sunshine”) hasn’t done a lot of blockbuster movies, “to my surprise it’s pretty fun,” he says. “I’ve really enjoyed the fan element of Batman culture and I think because I also fell in love with the comics so hard studying for this, I feel a small part of that (world).”