Who Has Played Batman? — Batman Actors List

By Emily Lemon On Mar 7, 2022

Warner Bros.

There’s a great moment in the 2014 comedy Neighbors where an intoxicated Seth Rogen and Zac Efron are just sitting back, talking shop, and a natural topic comes up: the Caped Crusader.

“Who’s Batman to you?” Rogen asks his co-star. “Are you kidding me?” Efron replies. The only option is Christian Bale in his mind. Rogen’s character seemed to know this would be the answer, but just wanted confirmation. “Michael Keaton is Batman to me,” he replies, before the two launch into their own Batman voice impressions of the two actors.

This conversation is one that’s surely replicated often around the country. It could easily be argued that Batman is the closest thing the United States has to England’s James Bond: an iconic character who will seemingly go on forever, passing from actor to actor.

In 2022, we get yet another contender: Robert Pattinson, who was cast as Bruce Wayne way back in the pre-pandemic stone age of 2019, and finally gets to unveil his take on the stoic crimefighter in director Matt Reeves‘ sweeping, visually stunning The Batman. Pattinson had his work cut out for him, but with a take that’s “inspired by Kurt Cobain,” it promised to be different from any we’ve seen before. And it delivered.

And that’s just a handful of the picks. Now, for this piece we’re keeping our options to the movies that were released cinematically in a major way. That means that Will Arnett (The LEGO Batman Movie) counts, but Kevin Conroy (the iconic voice from Batman: The Animated Series) does not. When Keanu Reeves makes his Dark Knight debut in DC League of Super-Pets (out later this year), we’ll have some serious thinking to do. When Michael Keaton reprises his role as Batman in The Flash and Batgirl, we’ll have to once again reconsider his place within the ranking.

That said: let’s get to the rankings. To the Batcave!

Advertisement – Continue Reading Below

8. George Clooney (Batman & Robin)

Oh man. You love George Clooney. We love George Clooney. Everyone loves George Clooney.

But his single turn as the protector of Gotham in 1997’s disastrous Batman & Robin was… not it. Clooney’s Batman was a bad part of a worse movie—and the Academy Award-winner has always been self-aware enough to own it to this very day. The nipples? The credit card? What in the world was going on here? Legend has it that if someone sees Clooney in the street and mentions Batman & Robin, he offers a ticket refund on the spot.

7. Adam West, (Batman [TV Series]; Batman: The Movie)

Adam West is the original Batman to many, but he never really captured the dark spirit of what made this character classic to so many people. The original series was essentially a sitcom. Still, West laid the groundwork for many of the more impressive portrayals on this list. Without West’s original portrayal, there would’ve been nothing to build upon.

6. Val Kilmer (Batman Forever)

Val Kilmer‘s Batman is a weird case. In a lot of ways, he’s the most forgotten Batman of the bunch—not as horrid as Clooney, not as memorable as some of the higher entries on the list, and in a movie that was the first post-Tim Burton entry of the ’90s. Kilmer’s Batman is fine, but it’s a slippery slope when competing against the film’s villains: Jim Carrey’s totally off-the-wall Riddler or Tommy Lee Jones’ outrageous take on Two-Face. Batman Forever was just weird, man. It’s not really of any fault to Kilmer, but you kind of understand why all parties decided to reset after this.

5. Ben Affleck (Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice; Suicide Squad; Justice League; Zack Snyder’s Justice League)

The movies where Ben Affleck played Batman were not particularly good. Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a vast improvement on the original 2017 cut of Justice League, is probably the best of the bunch—but at four hours long it’s not the most accessible film on the list.

But even in the movies that aren’t particularly good, like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Affleck is a pretty solid grizzled, older, bitter Bruce Wayne, and his Batman was a little shakier, but still, not that bad. “Not that bad” is not necessarily the same as “good,” and when the rest of the movie around “not that bad” is “kind of horrible,” that’s not a totally winning recipe.

4. Will Arnett (The Lego Movie; The Lego Batman Movie; The Lego Movie 2)

Sure, Will Arnett isn’t himself donning the cape and mask, and sure, his Batman is interacting with other Legos rather than escaped inmates from the Arkham Asylum, but let’s be real: This Batman rules. The movie’s writers have clearly done their homework and figured out what can make the character funny (namely, a total absence of self-awareness). Outside of Bojack Horseman, Batman is Arnett voice acting at its very best.

3. Michael Keaton (Batman; Batman Returns)

As Tim Burton’s Batman and the first real portrayal of the character (sorry, Adam West) that we got on screen, Michael Keaton embodies the qualities that have always made a great Batman. He’s daunting and looks good in the suit, but also has a Bruce Wayne charisma that stands out.

This role defined an era of Keaton’s career. His familiarity with playing a superhero even helped prepare him for Birdman, which jump-started a later career renaissance for Keaton (which also included another superhero movie screen credit as the villain in Spider-Man: Far From Home).

2. Robert Pattinson (The Batman)

After five other dudes got to take a swing at Batman in the last 30 years, it may have seemed impossible that anyone would be able to do, well, anything different with Gotham’s Dark Knight. But Robert Pattinson did just that in The Batman, playing Bruce Wayne not with the smugness of Christian Bale or the Coolness of Michael Keaton, but instead as a quiet, moody recluse. This is a Batman who listened to My Chemical Romance and Taking Back Sunday in his youth, and with the movie set in our present day, that 100% tracks.

Pattinson also gets to do something no other Batman has really done before: be a detective. He looks like a million bucks in that Batsuit, but underneath it it really seems like he’s finding clues in a David Fincher movie like Zodiac or Se7en. His fighting is brutal; sometimes fights in superhero movies can feel a little soft, but you can feel the weight he’s putting into every bad guy getting a haymaker to the face.

This is a version of the character fans have been wanting for quite a while, and with the movie’s box office success, the expectation is they’ll be seeing plenty more.

1. Christian Bale, Batman Begins. The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises

Is the lead in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy actually…underrated?

As an actor, it’s hard to argue that Christian Bale is underrated given his near-perennial success at the Oscars. But since so much of the attention in Nolan’s trilogy tended to go to the villains (Heath Ledger’s Joker, Tom Hardy’s Bane), Bale’s pitch-perfect Batman managed to somewhat fly under the radar.

Christian Bale’s Batman is perfect. He plays Bruce Wayne with not quite the same cockiness that Robert Downey Jr. uses to play Tony Stark (note: Bale first played Batman in in 2005; Downey Jr.’s first Iron Man appearance came in 2008), but with a unique level of rich guy swagger that no other Bruce Wayne portrayal has touched.

There’s also the fact that Bale simply had perfect chemistry with just about everyone he came into contact with in the films, whether it was one of the aforementioned villains, Michael Caine’s Alfred, anyone. It’s probably a testament to Bale’s Academy-Award pedigree, but he can really make a scene electric with just about any acting partner, and Christopher Nolan was the perfect director to take advantage of that.

Bale was only 31 when Batman Begins came out, so he’ll still maintain his distinction of the youngest Batman—Robert Pattinson turns 36 later this year.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

Advertisement – Continue Reading Below

This article was originally posted here.

Share FacebookTwitterGoogle+ReddItWhatsAppPinterestEmail