UPDATE 2 9/29: Primetime opened to $19.2 million, and Puck News named Pattinson its “Who Won the Week”.
UPDATE 9/27: Following this article, our Paramount insider tells us the studio is expecting a mega hit from The Batman Part II, with the dailies blowing people’s minds.
Robert Pattinson sat down with director Lance Oppenheim for GQ’s Action Replay series, where the two broke down scenes from Primetime, The Batman, and Oppenheim’s Ren Faire docuseries.
Primetime, which stars Pattinson as To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen, opens in theaters today.
When the conversation turned to The Batman, Pattinson revealed the specific comic he built his Dark Knight on, along with new stories about the voice, the “I’m Vengeance” line, and what actually happened while filming the train station fight.
‘I’m Becoming This Other Thing’
Pattinson said he went looking for territory the other Batman movies hadn’t covered and found it in Batman: Shaman, the 1989 Dennis O’Neil and Ed Hannigan story that launched Legends of the Dark Knight and dug into the mystical side of the bat symbol.
“There’d been amazing interpretations of the character and I was just trying to find out what is the thing that hasn’t really been found,” Pattinson said.
“I read so many of the graphic novels and found this one called Shaman, and that was all about the kind of metaphysical aspects of what the symbolism of the specific bat means and just trying to abstract the idea rather than saying, ‘Yeah, it’s taking away the logic of becoming Batman and saying, no, I’m becoming this other thing.'”
Pattinson continued, “It’s not just to scare the criminal, it’s for yourself, and it’s because you feel a profound connection with this creature that you’ve created, which you then think you’re becoming or that it truly is you, even though you’ve constructed it yourself.”
The comic also changed how he treated the suit.
“I’m doing so many conversations and things in this outfit and I’m like, you have to believe that it’s not an outfit and it’s just your skin,” he said. “I was trying to draw a lot from that one comic. I thought it was very helpful.”
A Profound Sadness
Asked how he came up with the Batman voice, Pattinson said it started with late nights walking around Bayswater, a neighborhood in London.
“A lot of wandering around Bayswater in the middle of the night, like muttering to myself,” he said. “It was very cold in January and I was trying to do something where it’s just like a profound sadness more than anything else. That was the one thing which hadn’t really been touched on that much in the other movies.”
‘I’m Vengeance’ Wasn’t In The Script
Batman’s famous introduction played out differently on the page, as the whisper was Pattinson’s idea.
“I think that wasn’t even in the script,” he said. “The scene was I come out and they go, ‘Who are you?’ and they say, ‘I’m Vengeance,’ and then beat everybody up. And I’m like, ‘Nah, you shouldn’t even respond. You beat everybody up.'”
Pattinson continued, “Once the guy’s basically unconscious, you whisper it in his ear. So as he’s drifting out of consciousness, it goes into his dreams.”
“Wow. Oh, wow. That’s amazing,” Oppenheim reacted.
Punching The Stunt Guys For Real
Pattinson also revealed the cowl left him swinging blind during the train station fight.
“We did the wide of that entire fight a bunch of times. I knew how to do that entire fight from beginning to end,” he said. “But it’s quite funny because you can’t see anything. So I’m literally just punching people in the face and you’re hearing all the stunt guys be like, ‘It’s cool. It’s cool. It’s cool. Just keep going, keep going.’ I’m just like, ‘Oh!’ Just punching everybody.”
Oppenheim asked if all that training meant Pattinson could win a real fight with the choreography.
“When I was training all the time for doing a lot of stuff on that, you really feel like you can, and that’s when you get into a dangerous situation,” Pattinson said. “Ironically, when you put the suit on, it makes pretty much anybody can beat you in a fight. You can just push them over. It’s almost impossible to stand up again.”
Pattinson added he first saw the finished sequence in the massive theater on the Warner Bros. lot, sitting with producer Dylan Clark.
“As they turned I was like, ‘What?'” he said. “That is not how it felt when you’re doing the fight.”
Pattinson recently called the sequel “a real left turn” from the first movie, and said this version of Bruce Wayne wouldn’t fit in James Gunn’s DCU.
He is currently filming The Batman Part II with Matt Reeves, which opens in theaters and IMAX on February 18, 2028, with Scarlett Johansson and Sebastian Stan joining the cast. All our coverage of the sequel lives in the The Batman Part II guide.
