The Batman: Robert Pattinson was asked to change his Batman voice

Although Christian Bale’s Batman movies are still held in high-regard, the actor still gets shit for the overly gruff voice he chose to use as Batman. With Robert Pattinson taking on the cowl for The Batman, we’ve got a new Batman voice to look forward to, but the one we hear on screen won’t be the one the actor tried to do.

While chatting with Jimmy Kimmel, Robert Pattinson revealed that he had initially tried to do a “radically different” Batman voice before he was asked to stop doing it several weeks into shooting.

Everyone does this kind of gruff, gravelly thing, and I’m like, ‘I’m going to do the opposite — I’m gonna go really whispery.’ And I tried to do it for the first two weeks, and it just looked absolutely atrocious, and they told me to stop doing it.

Robert Pattinson did wind up adopting a more traditional Batman voice for the movie, but later found out he was in good company. “I found out from Nick, who was putting me in the suit every day, that’s what Christian Bale did on Batman Begins as well,” Pattinson said. “And if you listen to the first Batman Begins teaser trailer, you can hear the original voice. I only found this out a couple of weeks ago.” Pattinson added that the Batman voice is something you just have to keep working at. “You can feel when it feels right,” Pattinson said. “You put the suit on, and you have to speak in a certain way.“

Although Robert Pattinson’s Batman voice may not be a big departure to what’s come before, he’s previously teased that his take on the character has had something of a breakdown because his war on crime isn’t going nearly as well as he would have hoped. “In all the other movies, Bruce goes away, trains, and returns to Gotham believing in himself, thinking, I’m gonna change things here,” Pattinson said. “But in this, it’s sort of implied that he’s had a bit of a breakdown. But this thing he’s doing, it’s not even working. Like, it’s two years into it, and the crime has gotten worse since Bruce started being Batman. The people of Gotham think that he’s just another symptom of how shit everything is.” The Batman is set to hit theaters on March 4, 2022.