Kevin Conroy, the voice of Batman in pretty much every cartoon version of the character since 1992 (excepting the lovely Batman: The Brave and the Bold and the awful The Batman, and including Batman: Arkham Asylum), was in attendance at the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo. At his solo Q&A panel, a fan asked him to give his opinion on the voice that his cinema successor Christian Bale gave to the character.
Said Conroy: “Obviously someone should have stopped him and said ‘You sound ridiculous.'”
The actor made it clear that he considered Bale to be a great actor, laying the blame for the grating, bordering on incomprehensible speech of The Dark Knight‘s Dark Knight on those around him. If all you have to see of your performance is unedited dailies, he said,
You’re working in such a vacuum that you can convince yourself that anything is great… You need a third eye to tell you when you’re way off base, and unfortunately, no one stopped him… I know how hard it is to not have that third eye.
For what it’s worth, this enormous Batman fan who came to the fandom through Batman: The Animated Series doesn’t feel too bad about Christian Bale’s Batman growl. Obviously it worked better in Batman Begins, but Bale didn’t actually have that many conversational lines as Batman in Begins. Most of Batman’s dialogue was spent hanging crooked cops off of buildings and screaming Rachel Dawes’ name at the top of his lungs. The Dark Knight, however, asked the same voice to carry on inside-voice conversations about the legality of vigilantism with a police captain and a district attorney. Bale really should have found some sort of intermediary tone. Hopefully we’ll see it in the next movie.
Conroy gives us a taste of how he might have done the role at the very beginning of Screenrant‘s footage of his response. Check it out below. He also mentioned, in the panel, that he has completed his share recording for Arkham Asylum 2.
(via Screenrant.)
