To look at Steven Seagal now you’d be hard pressed to believe he was ever the premiere badass on the big screen. But in the ’80s and early ’90s that’s exactly what he was with a string of hit films including Marked for Death (my personal favorite), Hard to Kill, and Under Siege. Execs over at Warner Bros. must’ve been a fan, because they saw something in Seagal that I don’t think any of us did at the time, and that’s someone who could’ve suited up as Batman.
If you were on social media you may have noticed the #Batman89 hashtags going around. That was to honor the 30th anniversary of Tim Burton’s Batman. To help celebrate, screenwriter Sam Hamm revealed to Syfy Wire that the initial plan was to cast an action star to play Batman, rather than look for an actor to play Bruce Wayne. That led to Seagal’s name being floated as a potential star. Oi vei.
“There were a lot of people at Warner Brother who wanted to cast it with an action star. They wanted to cast the part as Batman, as opposed to casting it as Bruce Wayne. You have to make Bruce Wayne work, because Batman is, for the most part, going to be a stunt guy, or it’s going to be somebody running around in a costume in long shot. You don’t need the martial arts expertise of, say, Steven Seagal or somebody like that because you can fake all of that kind of stuff. Seagal was one of the people that was suggested to us.”
It doesn’t seem as if Seagal got anywhere close to the job, which is fortune. He would’ve been dreadful. Not only could he not act, but his skillset as an action star was extremely limited. Of course, we know the job went to Michael Keaton who, at least to me, remains the best Batman ever.
