How Steven Seagal ended up in the running to play Tim Burton’s Batman: “Believe it or not”
For a brief moment, Hollywood seemed infatuated with the idea of Steven Seagal, a short-lived love affair that was swiftly dropped when everyone realised he couldn’t act his way out of a wet paper bag and he was a bit of a dickhead.
The 1980s were literally the only time in cinema history he could have succeeded, with the action genre enamoured by larger-than-life meatheads and martial artists like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Chuck Norris.
They were reliable box office draws, but the one thing they had in common was that, on a performative level, they sucked. Yes, Stallone notched an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ in Rocky, but once he found his groove as a gun-toting macho man, he became more synonymous with the Razzies.
As for Seagal? He looked convincing enough when brawling onscreen, regardless of how much his backstory and martial arts prowess are completely fabricated. He also had a strong jaw and a permanently furrowed brow, which was apparently enough to convince Warner Bros that he’d make a decent Batman.
Ironically, Michael Keaton had to rotate his entire upper body to move because he couldn’t turn his head, and robbing Seagal of his mobility, the one weapon in his performative arsenal that wasn’t objectively terrible, would have made it one of the worst casting decisions of all time, never mind the fact he doesn’t know how to emote, or that his ego would never let him cede the spotlight to Jack Nicholson’s Joker.
“Seagal was one of the people that was suggested to us, believe it or not,” screenwriter Sam Hamm confirmed to SyFy in a truly terrifying revelation. “He had just kind of appeared on the scene, people thought, ‘Holy cow, this guy’s badass. He could be Batman.'”
By “people,” Hamm presumably meant the studio’s top brass, who saw a guy who liked to glare at his enemies before beating them to a pulp and thought he’d make for an excellent ‘Caped Crusader’ despite his complete lack of such essential intangibles like acting ability, charisma, or name value outside of the core audience who flocked to see his formulaic beat-em-ups.
“I don’t think it ever got to the point where he read for it,” Hamm mercifully clarified. “He was just one of the names that was floated.” What makes it even more bizarre, if it wasn’t weird enough already, was that Seagal only had one film credit to his name by the time Batman entered production in October 1988, and Above the Law was only released six months before Burton started rolling the cameras.
While there’s plenty of history with relative unknowns being cast as iconic superheroes and making the role their own, with Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, and Christopher Reeve’s Superman springing to mind, Steven Seagal? Fuck off, it would have been an absolute disaster.
Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and he didn’t get an audition, with Keaton making a mockery of the backlash to his casting by defining the ‘Dark Knight’ on the big screen.
