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The Joker is one of the most important villains in history. His evil grin has appeared in everything from comics and movies and video games to every type of clothing and product to philosophical works by thinkers such as Franco Berardi. Two actors have won Academy Awards for playing the Joker on screen, and he continues to be a model for bad guys in every form of media.
So when the producers of Batman: Caped Crusader decided to include the Joker in their show’s second season, they had to think hard about a way to establish their take on the Clown Prince of Crime. According to actor Matthew Needham, best known for portraying the duplicitous Larys Strong on House of the Dragon, the audition had “two instructions” for their Joker. “He must be European and ludicrous,” Needham reveals to Den of Geek. While the latter certainly matches familiar aspects of the character, the former promises a Joker unlike anything we’ve seen before.
Of course, Caped Crusader may only have aired one season thus far, but it’s already shown a willingness to reinvent familiar parts of the Batman mythos. The series draws inspiration from the earliest Batman comics, complete with a 1940s setting and antagonists who feel more like gangsters than supervillains. The show has also had fun taking liberties with established characters, transforming the Penguin into the brassy dame Oswalda Cobblepot (Minnie Driver) and making Harley Quinn (Jamie Chung) frighteningly quiet.
By making him European, Caped Crusader clearly wants a new direction for its Joker. But Needham isn’t going to ignore what came before. “There have been so many iterations of the Joker that I love. I’m really grateful for their inspiration, and I love the direction that Caped Crusader wants to take. The idea of a cold, cool, calculating, and truly evil Joker is so exciting,” he enthuses. “I love the first animated series so much, and I really think that version of the Joker [voiced by Mark Hamill] was so much fun.”
For Batman’s voice actor Hamish Linklater, the arrival of the Joker further builds out the world of Caped Crusader because it provides the piece missing from his Batman. “When I saw the Joker for the first time, and I heard Matthew’s performance, I was like, ‘Oh, now I am complete’,” he reveals. “I had no idea what it was going to be like, and it went beyond my expectations.”
Linklater and Caped Crusader certainly know something about expectations. The fact that it comes from producers J. J. Abrams and Matt Reeves invites comparisons to Robert Pattinson‘s performance in The Batman, but the bigger name is that of developer and co-showrunner Bruce Timm, who co-created Batman: The Animated Series.
“My objective in playing this part has always been to honor Kevin Conroy,” says Linklater, paying homage to the late, great voice actor who played Batman in The Animated Series and follow-ups such as Batman Beyond and Justice League. “It’s a great honor to make more of the content I loved so much as a kid.”
Yet, Linklater doesn’t do an impression of Conroy, a feat made easier by the nature of Caped Crusader. “The period of this show really determined how Bruce Wayne was going to be. He was going to be a playboy from that period, and that was really fun. The best instruction I received during season one told me that Batman is the man and Bruce Wayne is the character he puts on. The real person is the one under the mask.”
For co-showrunner James Tucker and executive producer Geoffrey Thorne, Caped Crusader exists to upset set expectations, even those held by fans of the original animated series. “We love the quirkiness of the first season,” says Tucker. “People wanted Batman to be warm and fuzzy, strangely enough, and we thought, ‘No! How can we have him pull as far away from humanity as possible?’ Because then we can have the fun of slowly pulling him back. There’s actual humor in that, and pathos. You feel for Batman because he’s a damned soul.”
For that reason, season two of Caped Crusader will “kick it up a notch, with more of everything: more action, more mystery, more messed-up Batman stuff, with him being anti-social but fighting against it,” promises Tucker.
“We’re incrementally making it a story of a man learning to be a person,” Thorne adds. “Batman wasn’t really a person in the first season. He was all broken to pieces. And in every season—theoretically, we’ll get a million of them—he’ll become a more full human being. He’ll learn more about what it’s like to be a person among other people.
“But in the process, he’ll be fighting a lot of people and wearing spandex and blowing stuff up and all that stuff we know,” he promises with a smile.
In short, Batman: Caped Crusader season 2 will continue to explode the familiar to find new aspects of the Dark Knight’s mythos. It’s a good thing they’ve got the right Joker to help with that chaos, someone European but as ludicrous as ever.
Batman: Caped Crusader season 2 debuts on Prime Video on July 31, 2026.
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