No./14 Inside Paul Dano’s inky riddle
The actor on turning his Batman villain into comic-book series THE RIDDLER: YEAR ONE
Cells from the new The Riddler:
DC, Getty Images, Landmark
IF YOU’RE WAITING for a follow-up to Matt Reeves’ The Batman, you won’t have to wait quite as long as you might think. It just won’t come in the form you might expect. October will see the release of The Riddler: Year One, a six-part comic-book series that delves into the origins of The Batman’s big villain. And it’s written by the man who knows that character better than anyone.
When Paul Dano was preparing to play Edward Nashton/the Riddler, he didn’t realise he was dreaming up a comic book. “One of the important steps for me [in preparing a character] is creating a backstory,” Dano tells Empire. “It’s about getting to page one of the script… so you’re operating partly from the subconscious of the character.” He usually creates journals to get him there, but this time, because he was playing a comic-book character, he started jotting down his thoughts on the Riddler’s history in a comic-book style. “I secretly thought, ‘This could be kind of cool as a comic.’ One day on set, I told Matt Reeves about a couple of my backstory things and he said, ‘That should be a comic.’” Reeves and producer Dylan Clark took the idea to DC, and the next day, Dano received the news that he was writing his first comic-book series. “Of course I was excited, but I also had this feeling of, you know, ‘Oh shit.’”