The Origin of the Batman Voice [ x ]

When you were first coming in and reading for this part, did you try to do anything—I mean we hear you talk now, you’re kinda in the middle of Bruce and Batman with your regular voice. Did you do anything bigger the first time you read it, or did you just try to be pretty natural?

I’m going back to myself back twenty years. You know what happened? It really was…it was just one of those fortuitous situations I was completely naive about the Batman legend. The only thing I knew was the Batman television series from the seventies which was much broader, much more cartoony than what they were going for. They were going for The Dark Knight mythos, and I had never read any of this. So I went in kinda blind. And they—Bruce Timm said ‘No, no, no. Forget about the TV show, that’s not it. This is totally different. Think of a psycho-drama,’ and he told me the story of the Wayne family tragedy.

And, so I just used my imagination as an actor and I put myself into a place in my head. So the voice, for me, wasn’t one that I imposed from the outside I thought ‘Oh, this’ll be a cool sound.’ The voice for me came from inside. I put myself psychologically into a place I thought of, and the more I thought of that pain and that sadness and darkness, the deeper and huskier and more intimate sound just came out. And it made sense. It just made sense for the character. When they heard it, they thought it made sense, too.