Eddie Redmayne Wants To Play The Next Batman Villain

PA/Warner Bros

Fantastic beast-man and theoriser of everything Eddie Redmayne has, for his next role, said he’d be up for jumping into Gotham and taking on the Caped Crusader.

Being sucked into a comicbook universe, whether it’s Marvel or DC, can be like being sucked into a black hole for an actor. You never what’s going to happen once you’re in it and certainly have no idea what will happen once you get spat back out.

Ryan Reynolds, for example, had a hard time of it firstly as Hannibal King in Blade: Trinity, then as Green Lantern in Green Lantern. Thankfully he seems to have firmly found his feet as Deadpool. The same cannot quite be said for the cast of Suicide Squad.

Warner Bros. Pictures

There are, fortunately, more success stories than not, especially recently. A mere cameo in a Marvel film, Jeff Goldblum in Thor: Ragnarok for example, can be great. On the other hand, an actor can take on a comicbook role so entirely it doesn’t matter what universe they’re in, it just seems to work.

Presumably hoping for the latter, Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne has thrown his hat in the ring to play another iconic Batman villain.

Warner Bros.

Last seen being portrayed by the inimitable Jim Carrey, outshining everyone else in the forgettable Batman Forever, Redmayne recently revealed he wants to play The Riddler.

Speaking to IMDb at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, when asked what ‘supervillain’ he’d like to play, Redmayne quickly responded: ‘I’d like to play The Riddler, just putting that out there.’

With Joaquin Phoenix’s highly anticipated turn as the Joker hitting cinemas next month, and Robert Pattinson’s version of Batman coming in the next year or two, it could be said comicbook movies, particularly in the DC universe, are beginning to take a darker turn, and it seems Redmayne wants in on the action.

Whether it’ll be a standalone story like Joker, or whether his Riddler will be cast as Batman’s next adversary – or whether it will happen at all – is yet to be seen of course, but after his time as the terribly nice and terribly British Newt Scamander in Fantastic Beasts, it would be interesting to see Redmayne take on the criminal mastermind that is Edward Nygma/The Riddler.

It’s not yet been announced who will play Pattinson’s counterpart, if there even is one, in his upcoming Batman trilogy, so there’s definitely a supervillain vacancy on the horizon. Could it be Redmayne as Riddler? We’ll see what Jim Carrey has to say on the matter.

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Charlie Cocksedge

Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.