“When is a secret no longer a secret?” That sounds like something The Riddler might ask. We have no twisty response like those put the way of Paul Dano’s unprecedentedly grungy take on that villain in Matt Reeves’s current, profitable The Batman. But we might suggest…
Oh, not yet. We need to warn you (again) that this article details a spoiler to the film currently playing four times a day in every screen of your local GiantoPlex. Punters have become unreasonably pernickety about these things in recent years, but our current topic certainly meets the definition. Blah, blah, blah. Have we filled enough space to get to the meat of the story?
Look away now.
The Irish media has always been indecently keen to publicise the offering of a big part to any domestic star. Yet you will see almost nothing in our competitors’ pages about a local actor securing one of the hottest recurring roles in recent cinema history. The character is one of only two fictional beings – the other is Vito Corleone from The Godfather – to generate two Oscar-winning performances. The incoming performer is universally admired. Have you got there yet?
Even after The Batman ended, most viewers remained unaware they had caught a brief glimpse of an Irish actor
Let us talk you through the last minutes of The Batman. The Riddler, played by a combat-jacketed Dano, is confined within Arkham Asylum after a failed attempt to ruin Gotham City. As he contemplates his misery, a mysterious figure, his face obscured, appears in the half-darkness. The Riddler asks who he is. “Riddle me this: the less of them you have, the more one is worth?” the stranger quips in a familiar, swampy voice. “A friend?” Riddler suggests. Both men descend into mad cackles. Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha! Even the most casual Batpunters immediately grasped they were watching the unveiling of a new Joker. But only those who had been following the gossip closely – or had made an intricate study of the concealed actor’s vocal intonations – figured out we were hearing the Dean of Summerhill. Yes, it seems Barry Keoghan really is the latest Joker. The young man is truly unstoppable.
The rumour did surface last November, but it was shut down so quickly that almost everyone thought there was nothing to it. Writing on Facebook, Eric Keoghan, the actor's brother, announced: "So it's finally out My Brother playing the JOKER in the new Batman Unreal Stuff." The post was removed and everyone went about their business. We knew that Colin Farrell was playing The Penguin. We knew that Robert Pattinson was "The" Batman. No mention of the Joker appeared anywhere on the Internet Movie Database listing. It was put about that Keoghan was playing a Gotham City police officer named Stanley Merkel. "When you're making a movie like this, you want it to be different," Reeves said. "You want people to feel like they're having a special experience. So we started thinking what we could do to throw people off that scent."
The manoeuvrings remind us of the recent effort to conceal that Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire would be returning as parallel incarnations of the title character in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Those characters were, however, so integral to the plot that, following the film’s release, they almost immediately escaped the spoiler shroud. With more or less every Spider-Fan already certain the two actors were appearing, the “reveal” was more of a confirmation. Keoghan’s appearance is considerably more slippery a manoeuvre.
As noted above, even after The Batman ended, most viewers remained unaware they had caught a brief glimpse of the weird kid from The Killing of a Sacred Deer. It eventually emerged that Keoghan was indeed playing “Unseen Arkham Inmate”. Reeves confirmed the consequent bleeding obvious to Variety magazine. “You’re right,” he said in response to the inevitable question. “It is the Joker.”
Yet it feels as if games are still being played. The part of the fanbase that had put the pieces together not unreasonably assumed that Keoghan was being set up for a role in the inevitable sequel or in the spin-off TV series. Barry could look forward to years of profitable cackling in the current gritty incarnation of DC’s most valuable property. Reeves was quick to douse speculation. “It’s not an Easter egg scene,” he said (referencing nerd-slang for a hidden element in video games or other media). “It’s not one of those end credits Marvel or DC scenes where it’s going, like, ‘Hey, here’s the next movie!’ In fact, I have no idea when or if we would return to that character in the movies.”
We must take Reeves at his word. Yet it is safe to assume that the fanbase would greatly enjoy seeing Keoghan return in scary clown makeup for a sequel. The character is unstoppable. Heath Ledger won a rare posthumous Oscar for the role in Christopher Nolan's still thrilling The Dark Knight. Joaquin Phoenix took his Academy Award for a riff on Martin Scorsese's King of Comedy in the Batmanless Joker.
A graduate of RTÉ’s Love/Hate, Keoghan, endlessly companionable in person, has shown his gift for malevolence in David Lowery’s The Green Knight and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Nobody would better suit the more grounded, aless fantastic class of villain Reeves has given us in the current film. Would they really cast a Joker and then never show us his face?
Keoghan will be all right even in the unlikely event of the character being shelved. Later this year, he will appear opposite Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Kerry Condon in Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin. He is also in Apple’s epic second World War series Masters of the Air. “Don’t follow the money,” he told The Irish Times a few years ago. “Follow the art.”
The Batman is on release everywhere
