Just when you thought Christopher Nolan had mostly quelled wild Dark Knight Rises rumors, now comes Deadline's report that Joseph Gordon-Levitt may be joining his Inception director and co-star Tom Hardy in the third Batman film. Last summer, of course, Gordon-Levitt was also said to be in talks to play the Riddler, back when everyone from Eddie Murphy to the late Fred Gwynne was set to play the Riddler, and before Nolan flatly said that the villain in Dark Knight Rises “is not the Riddler.” But now we don’t know—do you think he might be the Riddler?
We kid, but the theory has already resurfaced—something about misdirection and the imprecision of Nolan’s words (that the Riddler won’t be the main villain)—but we’d say odds are that if Gordon-Levitt does join the film, he’ll play someone slightly less obvious, leaving the Internet once again open for the business of speculation. Some of the names currently being tossed around include Hugo Strange and Jean-Paul Valley (a.k.a. Azrael)—the latter owing to Bane’s appearance in the film, obviously—while equally likely is that Gordon-Levitt could play a regular old human person. But we're going to go out on a limb and say that The Dark Knight Rises is actually being told as a chantefable, and that Gordon-Levitt will sing the prelude to each scene while accompanying himself on lute.