Steven Seagal Was Considered For The Role of Batman in Tim Burton's Film
Before Tim Burton cast Michael Keaton as Batman in his 1989 film, the studio was wanting to cast a big action star in the role and at one point they considered casting Steven Seagal! It’s hard to imagine him in the role now, but at the time, Seagal in the role of Batman might have worked. However, I would have never traded him in for Keaton and what he gave us. I love Keaton’s version of Batman.
This news came from screenwriter Sam Hamm, who told SYFY Wire:
“There were a lot of people at Warner Brother who wanted to cast it with an action star. They wanted to cast the part as Batman, as opposed to casting it as Bruce Wayne. You have to make Bruce Wayne work, because Batman is, for the most part, going to be a stunt guy, or it's going to be somebody running around in a costume in long shot. You don’t need the martial arts expertise of, say, Steven Seagal or somebody like that because you can fake all of that kind of stuff. Seagal was one of the people that was suggested to us.”
While the actor was considered for the role, he actually never came in and auditioned for it. Hamm went on to say:
“Believe it or not. He had just kind of appeared on the scene, people thought holy cow, this guy’s badass. He could be Batman. I don’t think it ever got to the point where he read for it. He was just one of the names that was floated.”
I’m glad that they went with Keaton in the end, but when he was cast, it was met with controversy. Even back in the 80s the fans were complaining about casting choices. No one thought that the actor, who was mostly known for his comedic work, would be able to pull it off. But, he proved everyone wrong. According to Hamm, Keaton was the guy that he and Burton envisioned as Batman.
When talking about the character and their vision for him, Hamm explained:
“Bruce Wayne is a guy who has made a sort of crazy career decision, is the way that we put it. A bad thing happened to him a long time ago,
“He was rich. He came into possession of great wealth. He had no apparent authority figure in his life, except his employee. As far as everybody knows, the guy that raised Bruce Wayne was his butler. So if the butler says, ‘Master Bruce, this is crazy. You can’t put on a suit and go out and fight crime,’ then Bruce could just say, ‘Alfred, you’re fired. I’ll find another butler.’
“So he didn’t have any kind of steadying influence telling him, ‘You got to get over this. You got to put it all behind you and figure out something productive to do with your life.’ He was just able to sort of nurse his wound over all these years.
“Then we thought, what if you had this guy who started off on this project and he’s just in the first few weeks of it, and some of it’s working and some of it’s not working, and he’s still trying to figure out what’s working and what’s not working. He starts to think, ‘What if I could have a normal life?’ In other words, what if Bruce Wayne started to go sane? That was our story.”
Burton and Hamm handled Batman perfectly in that film. What do you think of the thought of Steven Seagal playing him? Do you think he would have worked in the role?