Christian Bale Willing To Return as Batman—With One Stipulation

Christian Bale is currently doing press for his role as Gorr the God Butcher in the upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder from director Taika Waititi. And while it is far from Bale’s first turn as a villain (shoutout to my favorite, Patrick Bateman), it’s also a return, for Bale, to the superhero genre. He played Bruce Wayne in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and was asked about his turn as Batman and if there was a future for him in the cowl.

In an interview with ComicBook.com‘s Brandon Davis, Bale was asked whether or not he’d come back to play Batman, or if anyone reached out to him with the influx of Bruce Waynes heading to Andy Muschietti’s The Flash. “No, no, no. Nobody, nobody reaches out to me or they keep me like a mushroom, keep me in the dark and feed me sh-t,” Bale said. “For me, that would be a matter of Chris Nolan, if he ever decided to do it again and if he chose to come my way again, then yeah, I would consider it because that was always our pact between each other is we would just stick to it. We said we would only ever make three. And then I said to myself, and I’d only ever make it with Chris.”

So what’s fascinating is that Bale didn’t say no. In fact, he said that he would very much consider it as long as Christopher Nolan were there to lead the charge. So I guess the battle now is trying to get Christopher Nolan back on the Batman train?

Back to the Nolan-verse

The Christopher Nolan Batman movies are different from the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher movies that we got in the ’80s and ’90s, but they also ushered in a more realistic Gotham. Personally, I loved Nolan’s Batman movies. I stand by my love for them, and as a huge fan of Batman, they brought a new weight to Gotham because it could very much be a city in the real world. Other versions of Gotham are so out of left field that it just feels like it is so removed from our real life, but Nolan set it in a world we can sadly see reflected in our own.

So I think there will always be a place for the Nolan-verse, and we’ll always have a chance of revisiting that world, and it will always have a relevance in our real world. I don’t necessarily think we need another Batman movie anytime soon, and I do love what Matt Reeves did with The Batman, even if Bale hasn’t seen it yet. In speaking with Variety, he talked about Robert Pattinson taking on Batman in that film and how he will see it … eventually. “I still haven’t seen it. I will see it,” Bale told Variety. “Listen mate, it’s amazing how few films I see. Every director I work with, I’ve seen a couple of their films and they’re always looking at me going, ‘Are you kidding?’ I like to really savor films and I don’t watch too many. But I will, I certainly will. Robert is an absolutely wonderful actor. We bumped into each other, talked a little bit about it ahead of time, and I heard wonderful things.”

I do think I have a hope that I’ll see Christian Bale as Batman again. I just don’t know when (or if) that will ever happen.

(featured image: Warner Bros.)