‘The Batman’ Casts Paul Dano As The Riddler

Riddle me this!

Paul Dano has been cast to play The Riddler in director Matt Reeves’s The Batman.  Warner Bros. announced. The superhero flick already has booked Robert Pattinson as the Caped Crusader and Zoe Kravitz as Catwoman.

Dano, a skilled actor best known for playing a convict in HBO’s Escape at Dannemora and a young preacher in There Will Be Blood, follows in the question mark suit-clad footsteps of Frank Gorshin and John Astin, who both played The Riddler on the 1960s TV series, while Jim Carrey played him in 1995’s Batman Forever. Meanwhile, Jonah Hill had previously been rumored to have been up for the Penguin role in The Batman.

The Hollywood Reporter geeked out on the legacy of the iconic DC supervillain:

Created by Bill Finger and Dick Sprang, The Riddler — aka Edward Nygma, or “E. Nigma” — is a supervillain who aims to challenge Batman in a battle of wits, leaving clues and riddles for the world’s greatest detective to solve in order to catch him.

Since debuting in 1948’s Detective Comics No. 140, he has gone on to become one of the most high-profile Bat-villains, appearing in movies, cartoons and video games over the past seven decades, stretching his question-mark gimmick as far as it could go and then some, including spending some years as a good guy when he realized it was just as much fun to solve crimes as it was to commit them.

Warner Bros. will release The Batman on June 25, 2021.