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Google PlayRobert Pattinson’s increasingly quotable pre-Batman press blitz continued this week with a 14-minute Jimmy Kimmel Live! chat, complete with some Batsuit insight of the auditory and urinary variety.
Around the 8:32 mark in the video above, Kimmel asked Pattinson to detail how long it took him to figure out his take on the oft-husky voice of the character. Pattinson revealed his initial instinct was to go in a starkly different direction than in previous iterations, marking an approach that, unknown to him at the time, had previously been attempted by Christian Bale.
“I actually found out a funny thing about it because I wanted to do a radically different thing to all the other Batmans. … I just thought because everyone does this kind of gruff, gravely thing, I’m like, I’m gonna do the opposite,” he said. “I’m gonna go really whispery. And I tried to do it for the first, like, two weeks and it just looked absolutely atrocious and they told me to stop doing it.”
As for the Bale bit, Pattinson said a crew member informed him of this slice of backstory, noting that Bale’s “original voice” can be heard in an early Batman Begins teaser trailer. “You can feel when it feels right,” Pattinson said of eventually getting comfortable with the voice heard in Matt Reeves’ upcoming film.
Earlier in the chat, around the 6:18 mark, Kimmel inquired about any advice the actor may have received from the Batmen of years gone by, prompting a recollection of a urination-focused memory involving aforementioned Nolan trilogy star Christian Bale.
“I bumped into Christian Bale in a, like, next to him at a urinal,” Pattinson recalled. “And I guess it kind of inspired him to say, ‘The first thing you need to do in the Batsuit is figure out a way to pee.’ And so when I went to the costume department, I said, ‘First things first, I need a patch. I need a flap on the back.’ Easy access.”
See more from Pattinson and Kimmel, including some talk on Tom Holland’s apparent Spidey manifestation tactics, above.
This week also saw Pattinson and his Catwoman-portraying co-star, Zoë Kravitz, taking the cover of Entertainment Weekly. In the accompanying interview, both got candid about the difficulties of their respective roles. For Pattinson, he likened himself to a used “piece of bubble gum” by the last day of shooting.
“Normally, I don’t have a problem [shaking a character off at the end of the day], but this was so all-encompassing,” Pattinson told EW. “I just stayed in a hotel for the whole week right next to the studio because I’d have to get there at like 4:30 a.m. to start training, and then you’d train after, so you’d be finished at like 9:30 at night. You’re just constantly in that world. When I look at photos of myself from the makeup test on the last day, I don’t even look human by the end of it. I look like I’m a piece of bubble gum that’s been stuck on the streets for like three years and has just been scraped off and put in a Batman outfit.”
Kravitz shared similar insights, saying “it was the solitude and the routine that was really hard,” both of which were complicated even further by the pandemic.
Head here for the full EW feature, which also sees Reeves touching on his intentions for the film to serve as the launchpad for “a Batverse.” The Batman, also starring Paul Dano and Jeffrey Wright, is out March 4.
