Top 11 Performances in Batman Movies

With the trailers for Matt Reeves’The Batman (2022) getting re-mixed and re-edited we thought we’d take a moment to look back at the canon of live-action Batman films and find the best actors giving the best character performances.

Much thanks to Kyle and Angela Howe whose late night conversations inspired and developed this list.

11. Cillian Murphy as The Scarecrow

Appearing in Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and briefly inThe Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Before there was Heath Ledger’s memorable pronunciation of “the bat…man” there was Cillian Murphy’s wild-eyed pharmaceutical industry stand-in, eager for his confrontation with the urban legend himself.

Watch The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006) to see why Cillian Murphy is still underrated and why revolutions can collapse under their own weight. Watch Batman Begins to remember how perfectly he was cast as Batman’s first baddie in the Nolanverse.

As the first post-Schumacher Batman villain, Murphy had to carry the burden of wiping from our memories the last villains to appear on-screen in a Batman film.

Do you remember who those were?

Murphy had to be believably unhinged as well as convincingly dangerous. He had to play it all with a just enough wink-and-a-nod to remind us we’re in a comic book universe, while grounding the character with enough real-world pathos (and hallucinogens) to make the credible the threat of Scarecrow’s nightmarescapes actually coming to life.

10. Jim Carrey as The Riddler

In Batman Forever (1995)

I am biased when it comes to Jim Carrey.

I grew up at the perfect age to memorize every line of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), I still think Me, Myself, and Irene (2000) is his funniest movie of all-time, and my sense of humor is so infused with his work that I caught myself laughing out loud a couple of times when rewatching him as Riddler in Batman Forever (1995).

Carrey is successfully over-the-top at a ratio inversely proportionate to the way the Schumacher sequels are failingly over the top. He finds the timing in lines like, “SERIOUS IMPULSE CONTROL PROBLEM” and when addressing Two Face, “you…and you”.

Carrey’s costume and the props around him are painfully obvious set-designs, but Carrey is strong enough of a performer to do something with a script that doesn’t give him many opportunities for laughs.

9. Michael Gough as Alfred

In all 4 pre-Nolan films: Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), Batman Forever (1995), Batman & Robin, (1997).

Appearing in more films than any other actor-character in the Batman live-action film canon (and the only to recur their role in all 4 non-Nolan films) Gough gives the dettached level of British cool performance you thought would come natural to Michael Mann and Christopher Nolan.

Like a mild Chicken Tikka Masala, his performance as Alfred is just spicy enough for an Englishman. And in the long tradition of stoic Englishman on film, Gough’s Alfred is a man of few words, popping in with witty comebacks or serving as Bruce’s expositional sounding board: ripping up an invite with muted glee, only to be suddenly dejected when Wayne reconsiders, keeping true-to-character through the entirety of two Schumacher sequels – Gough played it all to a level of preciseness with which his ever-present tux is tailored.

8. Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle

As seen inThe Dark Knight Rises (2012)

In her first 2 minutes on screen we see Hathaway go from meek and trembling (when Wayne shoots an arrow an inch from her face) to sarcastically coy (“oops…no one told me it was uncrackable”) to suddenly predatory (kicking Wayne’s cane out from beneath him and backflipping out a window) to silkly demur as she slips into a congressman’s chauffeured sedan with nothing more than, “can I have a ride?”

Throughout the first third of The Dark Knight Rises we see Hathaway, as Kyle, believably switch from one female archetype to another in a matter of seconds, taking advantage of the men around her, becoming what she knows they’ll believe: damsel in distress, young professional in over her head, hapless waitress, traumatized bar-goer who just witnessed a shoot out.

That subversiveness is what makes Selina Kyle/Catwoman such a successful film character: her ability to embody-so-as-to-defy the patriarchal expectations of her time (“I’m adaptable” she tells us).

However, once Hathaway goes full cat suit, Catwoman doesn’t get much more to do than lure Batman to a stronger male villain, whimper, randomly kiss Batman, and have a mild, unexciting turn of heart in the end.

Hathaway-as-Kyle peaks with a fun call back to Ballroom Scene in Batman Returns. In both The Dark Knight Rises and Batman Returns movies there is a scene where Selina Kyle dances with Bruce Wayne. In both movies Selina leans in and whispers in Bruce’s ear, dark musings on the state of policy and politics mixed with perfume-close enticement.

In the early 90s, and later on this list, we’ll see what American culture thought another Catwoman-as-Single White Female was capable of, and how the actress of her time reacted to that.

7. Michael Keaton as Batman

Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992)

“Villains are often, you know, some of the most, if not the most exciting part”, The Batman (2022) director Matt Reeves says about superhero movies.

Maybe that’s why the highest any Batman performance gets on this list is #7.

Batman’s relationship to actors (as a character to be portrayed) is a lot like Batman’s in-universe relationship as a hero to Gotham: he must be a blank slate.

To ground the outlandish villian performances, to be whatever Gotham needs him to be, Batman-as-character plays what would be the straight-man role in a comedy. Those interacting with him can bounce off his shroud of mystery like so many bullets of his suit. They can be zany, or manic, because he’s calm. They can wow us because he underwhelms us.

Keeping him in the shadows, Burton gives Keaton less than 5 lines of dialogue in the first 20 minutes of Batman and it’s that minimalist approach that Keaton plays to a quiet, brooding perfection.

Keaton and Burton, like Nolan and Bale later, had to re-establish Batman as a serious character after previous iterations had left a cartoonish taste in audience’s mouths (we love Adam West but his Batman was campier than camp).

I do have to say that Bale as an adult, pre-Batman Bruce Wayne is a close runner-up: at no other time in the 7-film live-action Batman canon do we see a pre-Batman Bruce Wayne who is not a child.

But in the end, Keaton is the Batman against which we compare all other bat men.

6. Gary Oldman as Commissioner Gordon

In all 3 Nolan films but particularly in The Dark Knight (2008).

I always thought Commissioner Jim Gordon was just a solid performance by an actor, Gary Oldman, known for stellar performances.

But on closer examination, Oldman is perfect in The Dark Knight.

Oldman’s steady presence lends seriousness to the impossibly complicated cat-and-mouse game that The Joker is orchestrating.

Ledger’s Joker pulls so many strings simultaneously, it would be easy for us as an audience to throw up our hands at the silliness. Let’s not forget, over a matter of mere days, he is responsible for:

• killing judges
• stealing all the mob’s money
• getting himself thrown in jail
• breaking himself out of jail
• lighting the mob’s money on fire
• sewing phone bombs into people
• detonating phone bombs that are sewn into people
• kidnapping Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes
• blowing up Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes
• building and hiding bombs on two passenger ferries
• blowing up a hospital

Oldman as Gordon is everything that you would hope a veteran of the force would be: calm but assertive, alarmed but not panicked.

In a movie filled with people yelling while walking into a room, or yelling while chasing cars, or yelling while walking away from explosions, Oldman yells the best (see: the scene where he walks into Joker’s holding cell, “I need ALL of you…”). When we’re not quite sure what’s happening in the “Unleashing The Chaos” aka “Murder 3 Municipal Staff Members Scene”, it’s Oldman’s raised hand, his “wait, wait, wait” that jump starts our adrenaline.

Take the Transfer Scene in The Dark Knight, the one with the rocket launchers and the flipping semi, right after Harvey Dent tells everyone he is Batman.

In the truck escorting Dent there is guy riding shotgun who delivers his lines with an “aww shucks, not this again” reluctance and whose fear and panic read as comical, reminding us (to the film’s detriment) how ridiculous what we’re watching, really is.

In a later, very similar scene we see Gordon riding shotgun in a police car giving directions, directing the action. Oldman is concerned and present, grave but determined. It’s not the flashiness we as an audience may want in a comic book movie performance, but it’s the gravity that The Dark Knight needs.

5. Jack Nicholson as The Joker

In Batman (1989)

Nicholson’s performance was a breakthrough in a decade known for breakthrough performances by baddies in larger-than-life roles: Biff Tannen, Scarface, General Zod, Ivan Drago, Darth Vader, KHAAAAAAN!, Hans Gruber to name a few.

Nicholson’s Joker has a silliness, a bombastic bigness that lightens a dimly lit Barman film. His improvised bird dance, his behind-the-back shoot-em-ups, his insistence on approving the Joker’s appearance are all the little things that make this outsized performance work.

All that said I assumed, perhaps, that Nicholson’s Joker would be higher on this list. But his performance doesn’t age as well as maybe the legend of his performance does. And knowing what Ledger has now done with the role plays a part in how we remember Nicholson’s. If performances after Nicholson’s stood on his shoulders, they still saw further none the less.

4. Tom Hardy as Bane

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

I didn’t expect it myself: Bane in the top 5. But for Hardy’s vocal inflections alone, Bane of TDKR is easily one of the most watchable characters in all of Bat-history.

In addition to the grief we all felt for Ledger’s loss – at times selfishly, as fans of cinema – I’m not sure I’ve ever been more disappointed that an actor wouldn’t be reprising their role as I was when Heath Ledger’s death made the return of his Joker impossible.

The disappointment with Ledger’s absence, along with the fact Rises can’t quite match the non-stop-but-balanced pace of its predecessor – The Dark Knight is no Paddington 2 of course, but it’s arguably a top 5 sequel in movie history – gave us all ample reason to overlook Hardy’s performance in The Dark Knight Rises.

No one will be able to live up to Ledger’s Joker, so, what were we all doing here, exactly? Recovering from spinal fractures by laying down in a cave for 6 months?

But Hardy’s Bane pulls us in with a darkly fun little Yoda voice trapped in a big bruiser’s body who says cryptic shit that borders on ridiculous at almost all times, “victory has defeated you”. But Hardy pulls it off.

He can be funny – at the stock market scene a broker says, “there’s no money here” to which he replies, “them why are you people here?” – and he can be menacing – the famous “I was born in the dark” monologue starts with, “let us not stand on ceremony”. (Is a monologue delivered between blows a fightologue?)

Watching it again, I’m grateful they re-dubbed Hardy’s lines to make them more intelligible, because Hardy has a lot of lines and he makes the most of them with a vocal performance that makes you forget the actor is unable to use facial expressions – you know, the thing actors use to act – for the near-entirety of Rises’ 166-minute run-time.

3. Danny Devito as The Penguin

From Batman Returns (1992)

The original Batman is held in high regard by many purists, but Batman Returns is in many ways the fully-realized vision of what Batman started.

Batman Returns is what we kind of all think the first Batman was: dark but comical, filled with shadows and self-aware of its more absurd moments.

Returns balances the comic book/obvious soundstage look of Burton’s first Batman film, with a more realistic grittiness. Tones that could be contradictory, become complimentary. Where in Batman we see a little too much of the sets, in Returns Burton paints with black, balancing the lighter, campier aspects of the film, themselves more on-pitch than in the first film.

More successfully than the original, Returns levels the dread with camp, and refines the Burton Batman aesthetic at every turn, from big cat-face balloons to little penguin backpacks.

Devito and Burton make one attempt to humanize Oswald Cobblepot: his abandonment, as an infant, by his parents. After that, they make no attempts to warm the audience to their snarling main antagonist.

Devito twitches and sways, grunts and growls, his performance lip-lickingly gross.

It is shocking in a sense, not in the sense that someone falling off a building on fire is shocking (looking at you “Ridiculousness”).

Devito’s Penguin performance is shocking in the way 1992 media was shocking compare to 2021 media: not in its ghastliness – films have done a lot of ghastlier things since – but in its commitment to a such a dingy, upsetting vision of Gotham’s underbelly.

And while Quora might disagree, I think Batman Returns was daring and perfect in pitch. Its non-climax climax is a narrative-first decision to have a flock of penguins shoot little tiny missiles that go nowhere. That ending is on scale with what a real bad guy might be capable of, especially one who controls penguins from a sewer hideout.

Devito’s Penguin holds up over time the way that Nicholson’s Joker probably wowed audiences in the moment. Nicholson opened the door for a such a sewage dwelling cretin as The Penguin to grace a major studio set-piece, a door Devito walked, no hobbled, right through.

2. Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman

Seen stealing all scenes in Batman Returns (1992)

“Meow”. Explosion.

No other actor has pulled off anything like “I feel so much yummier” with the mix of subversiveness, sarcasm, and downright sultriness, that Pfeiffer does in Returns.

From the moment she eeks onto the screen as Christopher Walken’s assistant during a Very Important board meeting, Michelle Pfeiffer-as-Selina Kyle is a wholly realized character: she ducks down and reaches out, awkwardly pouring coffee in a manner as to remain unseen, but which only draws more attention to herself. She stumbles through every social interaction, talking to herself, glasses just-so askew. She mutters self-deprecatingly about the men not in her life, Liz Lemon-like, a decade and a half before 30 Rock. “Honey I’m home” she says to no one,  entering her empty-but-for-her-cat apartment, followed by “oh, I forgot, I’m not married”. She’s exasperated and over it all.

5 minutes later she repeats the lines, “over it all” in a much…different way.

Every scene with Pfeiffer is a treat (before the above Backflip Explosion Scene, she whips and skips through a department store, playfully planting spray cans in a microwave), but you can see Pfeiffer’s impressive range on display in just 3 on-screen minutes during Return‘s Ballroom Scene, culminating with the perfectly delivered, “does this mean we have to fight now?”.

1. Heath Ledger as The Joker

The Dark Knight (2008)

There isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said.

We will never look at comic book movies the same way again.

Heath Ledger’s Joker elevated and raised the bar for all comic book performances to come, the way Nolan’s trilogy forced us to see the adultly-serious potential superheros and villains could have on the big screen.

The lip-licking, the facial ticks, the scramble in his violence, the trembling trills and the resonating bass of his voice (“LOOK AT ME”): Ledger pours choice into every single movement he makes. There isn’t a room he walks into, or coat full of grenades he doesn’t threaten you with, where Ledger misses an opportunity to remind us how unpredictable, how terrifying The Joker of 2008 is.