“Out of all the comic-book characters and that kind of movie, I’ve seen every single one of the [Batman] movies in the cinema, which I can’t really say I’ve done for any other series,” Pattinson told Total Film, as reported by Games Radar. “I was always really looking forward to them coming out. There was the combination of just being so attracted to it, but also feeling like it’d had a lot of movies made about it, and none of them are bad movies. People kind of shit on some of them, but they’re not actually bad. They all kind of completely achieve what they set out to achieve, and they’re all really interesting, according to their time and place. I don’t know. I just had a weird instinct about it. But I’ve always loved the character.”
Pattinson’s path to portraying Bruce Wayne also led him to “obsessively checking up” on Reeves’ project.
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“Even my agents were like, ‘Oh, interesting. I thought you only wanted to play total freaks?’ And I was like, ‘He is a freak!’” Pattinson said.
Reeves has already compared Pattinson’s take on the famed superhero to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, while Pattinson voiced his admiration for the Batmen who have come before him. But it was Pattinson’s perception of the emotional weight between the duality of Bruce and Batman that ultimately sealed the deal.
“He’s got this enormous trauma inside him, and he’s built this intricate, psychological mechanism to handle it,” Pattinson explained. “It’s like a really, really, really bad self-therapy, which has ended up with him being Batman at the end, as self-help.”
Writer-director Reeves previously told Moviemaker Magazine that the endurance of the Batman “myth” is almost unparalleled.
“He’s like James Bond, I guess, in a certain way, right? But there’s also something very relatable to the pain that he’s gone through,” Reeves said. “And so that, for me, was how you ground it — those aspects are part of the story. And this story emphasizes those things. This story pulls those things out.”
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