A few days ago MTV brought you news that Chris Cooper was ‘this’ close to snagging the role of Lt. James Gordon in Batman Begins, and wondered what it would be like if the Oscar-winner took the part instead of Gary Oldman.
That’s nothing, though, compared to the what-if game with Bruce Wayne himself.
“I went and did the screen test,” Shutter star Joshua Jackson revealed to MTV News. “I was one the last four or five guys [up for the role of Batman.]”
Jackson as Batman over Christian Bale? It’s hard to believe how different the film would have been had he nabbed the part – perhaps most of all to Jackson himself.
“I don’t like to lose any job, but they cast the right guy,” he said. “I mean, Christian Bale was excellent. I don’t really think of myself in a sort of comic book hero way, you know what I mean? This might be why I didn’t get that job.”
It’s hard to say, of course, why Jackson didn’t steal the role. But it certainly wasn’t from a lack of understanding of the character, a crime-fighting vigilante Jackson called “a tremendously f—ked up human being.”
“Batman is a man dealing with a deeply f—ed up childhood that has now carried itself forward. As a grown man he dresses up as a bat, goes and kicks the shit out of people at night. That’s a dark place,” Jackson said of what he would have focused on in his alternate universe portrayal. “And, you know, he is not a super hero so it hurts. He is obviously some sort of sadist. It’s not funny, the infliction and the feeling of pain.”
When he lost out on Wayne, Jackson seemed to have given up the goal of playing a super…for now at least.
“You know, honestly, out of the big super heroes the guy that I would most naturally be a fit to play is Spider-Man, but that one is pretty well locked up,” he said of the role made famous by Tobey Maguire. “And, frankly, I’m too old to play that character because the parable of Spider-Man is the teenager going through puberty.”
But there will be a Spider-Man 4, and Tobey hasn’t officially signed on…
“Well then, yeah,” Jackson laughed. “That was really subtle of me putting my name in the hat.”
Credit: MTV
