“I’ll be chaining myself up”: The character that would drive Christian Bale off a movie set
Everyone has their favourite Batman.
If you prefer your ‘Dark Knights’ on the brooding side, then Robert Pattinson’s portrayal in The Batman will be right up your alley, if playboy swagger is more your thing, then Michael Keaton has you covered, or you might even want to go down the hipster route and choose the late Kevin Conroy, who lent his gravelly pipes to various animated forms of the ‘Caped Crusader’. But if you’re not going to make the right choice (which is Adam West, by the way), then you could do much worse than Christian Bale.
Across Christopher Nolan’s much-praised Dark Knight trilogy, the Welshman presented a damaged, self-destructive version of Bruce Wayne who was hellbent on bringing justice at whatever cost. His three outings are widely credited with revitalising the character on the big screen and minting a brand new generation of Batman fans. Some are even calling for him to don the cape one last time, even though he has ruled this out multiple times.
Of course, it isn’t all fun and games playing Gotham City’s most eligible sociopath. There’s a lot of pressure that comes with the role. It was make-or-break for Bale and, luckily, he landed on the former. There’s also the character’s history of, how to put this lightly, shit, where the first Batman comic was published the same year that World War II broke out. You’re going to accrue a lot of guff in that time.
In a 2008 interview with Starpulse, Bale made it very clear that there was one bit of guff he wasn’t going to tolerate. “If Robin crops up in one of the new Batman films,” he said via Digital Spy, “I’ll be chaining myself up somewhere and refusing to go to work”.
Robin, the alias used by a number of Wayne’s sidekicks over the years, is a fascinating part of comic book history. He debuted not long after his mentor and has cropped up in various forms in the decades since, the most famous screen version coming from the Batman TV of the 1960s, where Burt Ward played Dick Grayson, the original incarnation of ‘The Boy Wonder’.
He is a staple of the early days of movie Batman, but was gradually phased out over time. He doesn’t feature in the two Tim Burton films, but was introduced by Joel Schumacher in his vastly underrated Batman Forever.
When Bale made those comments, the last time Robin had been seen in a major movie was Batman & Robin, a film despised by just about everyone. Nolan adhered to his star’s request and kept him out of his movies…mostly. At the end of The Dark Knight Rises, a revelation is made about Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character, Detective John Blake. An orphan, Blake’s real name is revealed to be none other than Robin, which led fans to speculate that he was the real deal, although it seems to have just been an homage.
He might not be held in as high esteem as his dark-suited colleague, but Robin is a character full of potential. Somebody has to give him the chance to prove himself, rather than trying to cover up one of the most important parts of Batman’s history.
