New footage from Warner Bros. and DC Films' The Batman features the first official look at Paul Dano's Edward Nashton/Riddler unmasked.The clip, which premiered on Good Morning America, depicts a scene from the film's main trailer. However, while the trailer cut away before showing his face, the new clip sees Dano turn around with his hands up as he gives Jim Gordon and the rest of the Gotham City Police Department a smirk before he's placed into custody.
Dano will be the third actor to play The Riddler in a live-action film following Frank Gorshin in 1966's Batman and Jim Carrey in 1995's Batman Forever. While both those portrayals were zany (for better or worse), Dano's Riddler takes cues from notorious real-world serial killers.
"The premise of the movie is that the Riddler is kind of molded in an almost Zodiac Killer sort of mode, and is killing very prominent figures in Gotham, and they are the pillars of society," director Matt Reeves previously explained. "These are supposedly legitimate figures. It begins with the mayor, and then it escalates from there. And in the wake of the murders, he reveals the ways in which these people were not everything they said they were, and you start to realize there's some kind of association. And so just like Woodward and Bernstein, you've got Gordon and Batman trying to follow the clues to try and make sense of this thing in a classic kind-of-detective story way."
Dano himself recently discussed his intense preparation for bringing The Riddler to life. "There were some nights around that I probably didn’t sleep as well as I would’ve wanted to just because it was a little hard to come down from this character," he said. "It takes a lot of energy to get there. And so you almost have to sustain it once you’re there because going up and down is kind of hard." Dano at one point also considered wrapping himself in plastic as a means of The Riddler preventing DNA from being left behind, but this proved too intense given the heat from the rest of his costume.
The Batman crusades into theaters March 4.
Source: Twitter