Robert Pattinson revealed during a recent “The Batman” post-screening Q&A (via Insider) that nailing his Caped Crusader voice “was a lot of trial and error.” The actor had “seven or eight months” prior to production to “experiment with a lot of different things” for his Batman voice, but he began filming the Matt Reeves-directed comic book tentpole without committing to a final vocal sound.
“I think the first two or three weeks, we were kind of doing a variety of different voices, because there’s only a couple of lines in the first few scenes we shot,” Pattinson said. “Me and Matt just sort of settled on something. It started to sit in a very particular place and it kind of felt like a progression from other kind of Bat voices and felt kind of somewhat comfortable to do as well.”
“I have to say that one of the amazing — many amazing — things about Rob is he has such incredible technical control of himself, of his instrument,” Reeves said of Pattinson’s voice. “He could do things with his voice, it was a crazy thing. I was like going, ‘Oh, you can go lower.’ And then he would. I was like, ‘That’s amazing.’”
“He went through this process of searching for where it felt like that voice should sit,” Reeves continued. “He has an incredible ear for mimicry and accents. He can pick up anyone’s accent. There’s no dialect coach.”
Pattinson concluded, “It seems obvious in retrospect, but you don’t really realize that a lot of it is — the whole character, the whole performance — your voice, and it’s kind of how many different shapes you can do with your mouth.”
“The Batman” is set for a nationwide release on March 4 from Warner Bros. Both Reeves and Pattinson intend to stick with the character for a potential new Batman movie trilogy, though the studio has not confirmed any official sequel prior to the film’s release. Pattinson stars in “The Batman” opposite Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Colin Farrell and Jeffrey Wright.