Leslie Grace teases the "badassery" of her Batgirl movie, Michael Keaton's return as Batman
The In The Heights star will don the purple suit in HBO Max's upcoming superhero adaption
Since the release of Batman (1966), the world has been gifted with movie after movie about the Caped Crusader. From campy to grizzled realism, we’ve seen the many masks of Batman—there was even a emo, younger version released this year! The time has finally come for one of Gotham’s other bat-related vigilantes to answer the call of the Bat Signal: Leslie Grace’s purple outfitted Batgirl AKA Barbara Gordon.
In an interview with Variety, Grace gave us some hints about to what’s to come in Batgirl, teasing stunts, fire, and… you guessed it: more stunts.
“There’s some crazy stuff that happens,” says Grace. “There’s lots of fire because as everyone knows by now, [Brendan Fraser] plays Firefly. There’s crazy fire. There’s crazy stunts, crazy drops. She’s a biker chick, so you’re going to see her do a bunch of badassery.”
Grace discussed how Fraser (the greatest dude around) helped her throughout scenes in which she fights his pyromaniac supervillain character.
“It was an incredible learning experience to be on set with also action veterans like Brendan Fraser, and soak up it all up,” she says about The Mummy star. “It was so hard because he’s our villain and I’m not supposed to like him but he’s such a huge teddy bear. He is one of the nicest people that I’ve ever met. In our fight sequences the way he would just hit marks, it came from all of his experience. You can’t improvise that kind of experience.”
The interview also gives us a tiny bit of information about Michael Keaton’s role in the film. Keaton will likely be reprising his iconic version of Batman first seen in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. If not exactly Batman, maybe Keaton will become the older mentor version of Bruce Wayne seen in the animated series Batman Beyond.
Seeing Keaton on set was apparently “wild for everyone,” according to Grace. “I couldn’t even believe that I was sharing space with Batman. I want to say more, but I can’t. It was insane, surreal, incredible.”
Bilall Fallah and Adil El Arbi are directing the film, with a screenplay written by Christina Hodson (Birds Of Prey). Starring alongside Grace is J.K. Simmons, Brendan Fraser, Michael Keaton, Ivory Aquino (Lapsis), Jacob Scipio (Bad Boys For Life), Rebecca Front (The Thick Of It), Corey Johnson (Morbius), and Ethan Kai (Killing Eve).
Batgirl is set to fly onto HBO Max in 2022