THE BATMAN Director Discusses the Look and Inspiration for Barry Keoghan's The Joker

Last week The Batman director Matt Reeves released a deleted scene from the film in which Batman goes to Arkham Asylum to talk with The Joker. I thought it was an interesting scene, and it offered a much better look at what Barry Keoghan’s version of The Joker is like.

Joker’s look in the film drew comparisons to the Death of the Family story arc where the Joker's face is cut off and reattached, further disfiguring the Crown Prince of Crime. It’s a pretty jacked-up look.

Reeves previously said Joker was inspired by Conrad Veidt’s performance in the 1928 silent film The Man Who Laughs, based on a novel by Victor Hugo. He explained, “It’s like ‘Phantom of the Opera. He has a congenital disease where he can’t stop smiling and it’s horrific. His face is half-covered through most of the film.”

In a recent interview with IGN, Reeves expanded on that, saying, "He's held in this very suspenseful way, away from you visually. But I wanted to create an iteration of him that felt distinctive and new, but went right back to the roots. So he's very much out of the Conrad Veidt mold and that idea of the silent film of The Man Who Laughs."

Reeves previously revealed that he wanted this version of The Joker to be based on a kid born with a condition in which he never stopped smiling. He said, “It’s not about some version where he falls into a vat of chemicals and his face is distorted, or what [Christopher] Nolan did, where there’s some mystery to how he got these scars carved into his face. What if this guy from birth had this disease and he was cursed? He had this smile that people stared at that was grotesque and terrifying. Even as a child, people looked at him with horror, and his response was to say, ‘Okay, so a joke was played on me,’ and this was his nihilistic take on the world.”

In this recent interview, Reeves expanded on this and likened the character to The Elephant Man. He says: "He can never stop smiling. And it made Mike [Marino] and I think about — I was talking about The Elephant Man because I love David Lynch. And I was like, 'Well, maybe there's something here where it's not something where he fell in a vat of chemicals or it's not the [Christopher] Nolan thing where he has these scars and we don't know where they came from. What if this is something that he's been touched by from birth and that he has a congenital disease that refuses to let him stop smiling? And he's had this very dark reaction to it, and he's had to spend a life of people looking at him in a certain way and he knows how to get into your head.'"

In regards to this version of Joker, Reeves explains, "Life has been a cruel joke on him. And this is his response, and he's eventually going to declare himself as a clown, declare himself as the Joker. That was the idea."

I actually like the direction that Reeves is taking with this classic villain character. It will be interesting to see how he continues to play with the character. I imagine that will happen in the Arkham series that Reeves is currently developing.