Jeffrey Wright is firing back at those who think he should not have played Commissioner Jim Gordon in “The Batman.”
During a recent interview with Collider, the “American Fiction” star discussed the negative reaction from some who thought a Black man shouldn’t play the leader of Gotham’s police force. Wright slammed the push back as “the dumbest thing” and absent of “all logic.”
“I really find it fascinating the ways in which there’s such a conversation, and I think even more of a conversation now, about Black characters in these roles,” Wright said. “It’s just so fucking racist and stupid. It’s just so blind in a way that I find revealing to not recognize that the evolution of these films reflects the evolution of society, that somehow it’s defiling this franchise not to keep it grounded in the cultural reality of 1939 when the comic books were first published. It’s just the dumbest thing. It’s absent all logic.”
Wright went on to say that the reason Batman has endured as an essential character in popular culture is because he was created to be “open-ended,” giving future storytellers the freedom to put their own spin on the Caped Crusader.
“I feel that I own these stories as much as anyone. Perhaps now, because I’m a part of them, I have the most skin in the game,” he added. “[Batman creators] Bob Kane and Bill Finger are two Jewish guys up in the Bronx, imagining heroes and villains in a city that looked like the city around them at the time, but I think what they imagined was open-ended. I think that the success and the longevity of these stories and characters are owing to the openness of their imaginations and what they created.”
Wright is set to reprise the role in Matt Reeves’ highly anticipated sequel “The Batman: Part II.” The script was recently completed, and after several delays, the film will debut on Oct. 1, 2027.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, DC Studios head James Gunn tempered frustrations with the postponements, saying fans “don’t need to be entitled” about when “The Batman: Part II” hits theaters.
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“Listen, we’re supposed to get a script in June. I hope that happens. We feel really good about it,” Gunn said. “People should get off Matt [Reeves’] nuts because it’s like, let the guy write the screenplay in the amount of time he needs to write it. That’s just the way it is. He doesn’t owe you something because you like his movie. I mean, you like his movie because of Matt. So let Matt do things the way he does.”
Read Wright’s entire conversation with Collider here.
From Variety US