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Matt Reeves Reveals Barry Keoghan’s Joker Origin In ‘The Batman’

Barry Keoghan’s Joker, the fourth mysterious villain from Matt ReevesThe Batman broke the internet with a deleted scene. The five-minute long deleted scene gave fans an extended look at this new iteration of the Joker – hair missing, nails bloody and facial scarring that’s never been seen on previous on-screen Jokers.

In an interview with Variety last month, Reeves said it was intentional for Keoghan’s Joker to break tradition when it came to the villain’s physical appearance. This Joker did not fall into a vat of chemicals like Tim Burton’s Batman, or have an open-ended reason for being scarred like Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight trilogy. Instead, the director akin Keoghan’s Joker to The Phantom of The Opera.

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“It’s like ‘Phantom of the Opera,’” Reeves said in the interview. “He has a congenital disease where he can’t stop smiling and it’s horrific. His face is half-covered through most of the film.”

barry keoghan the joker

“It’s not about some version where he falls into a vat of chemicals and his face is distorted, or what [Christopher] Nolan did, where there’s some mystery to how he got these scars carved into his face,” said Reeves of past iteration of The Joker. “What if this guy from birth had this disease and he was cursed? He had this smile that people stared at that was grotesque and terrifying. Even as a child, people looked at him with horror, and his response was to say, ‘Okay, so a joke was played on me,’ and this was his nihilistic take on the world.”

Now that the world has finally been introduced to The Crown Prince of Crime, fans can expect to see more of him in future projects. Maybe even in the recently announced Arkham Asylum HBO max series.

“There might be places,” teased Reeves. “There’s stuff I’m very interested in doing in an Arkham space, potentially for HBO Max. There are things we’ve talked about there. So it’s very possible. It also isn’t impossible that there is some story that comes back where Joker comes into our world.”

The Batman is now showing in cinemas.