A clearer shot of the Joker Barry Keoghan is spreading fast

Batman It surprised fans with the latest release of a major deleted scene featuring Robert Pattinson’s Batman meeting with the Joker, played by Marvel’s Eternals star Barry Keoghan. The scene saw Batman visiting Arkham Asylum for a Silence of the Lambs-style interview with the Joker about the Riddler case. Keoghan’s Joker takes on the role of Hannibal Lecter, as he helps Batman shape a profile of The Riddler’s serial murders. Director Matt Reeves kept the Joker’s face slightly blurred behind glass, or framed in a very close shot, not fully revealing the slime’s face.

However, it took the internet no time at all to come up with a clearer look at Barry Keoghan’s Joker in The Batman:

After a Batman fan did digital work to clean up the Joker’s image, industry expert Matt Ramos took it a step further and softened the image even further:

Reaction to Joker Barry Keoghan has been mixed. Some viewers find Keoghan’s Joker just a scary show of a villain, while DC fans find how Matt Reeves seemed to be inspired by Batman comics like “Death of the Family.” On the other hand, there is criticism that Joker Keoghan looks like something out of a B horror movie, and that the character was ultimately kept in an unseen role for good reason.

For his part, Matt Reeves spoke out to explain his reasons behind the new Joker’s appearance, which comes from the concept of “Joker is not Joker yet”:

He can never stop smiling. It made Mike [Marino] And I’m thinking of – I was talking about elephant man Because I love David Lynch. And I was like, ‘Well, maybe there’s something in here that isn’t something that fell into a vat of chemicals or it’s not [Christopher] Reeves explained to IGN that he had these scars and we don’t know where they came from.”

“What if this was something that affected him from birth and he had a congenital disease that refused to let him stop smiling? And he had a very grim reaction to it, and he had to spend a lifetime of people looking at him a certain way and he knows how to get into your head.”

The director ended by saying, “Life was a cruel joke to him. That was his response, and eventually he would declare himself as a clown, and declare himself as the Joker. That was the idea.”

It has to be said again: Reeves has also made it clear that this Joker’s veil is in no way a direct setting for any Batman sequel, so what you see above isn’t the Joker’s design going forward.

Batman It will be on HBO Max on April 25.