Anthony Michael Hall, who plays a TV newscaster in the upcoming Batman sequel The Dark Knight, told SCI FI Wire that it was a “wonderful opportunity” and that he got a kick out of the rumors that spread across the Internet suggesting that he was actually playing the Riddler.
“It was a great role and a wonderful opportunity to work with people I admire and look up to, like Gary Oldman [Jim Gordon],” Hall said in an interview to promote the DVD release of The Dead Zone: The Final Season. “I had a great experience working with Christian [Bale] and Heath [Ledger]. You know, Christian is really a contemporary of mine. We’re about the same age, and he started as a young boy, too, so I have a great respect for his career.”
Hall plays Mike Engle, anchor of Gotham Tonight, a news magazine on the fictional Gotham Cable News network.
Hall added that he had a chance to work with the late Ledger. “I had a great experience working with Heath,” Hall said. “I really saw him to be a nice guy and actually very [grounded]. I didn’t really see … I was very surprised by his unfortunate death.”
Hall denied rumors that he played the villainous Riddler. The rumors began when he and Oldman were filming an Engel-Gordon scene on location in Chicago last summer.
“This is really funny, because I heard about the whole ‘Is he playing the Riddler?’ thing from my mother,” Hall
said. “[But] between takes I walked out into the street. We were shooting in the lobby of a high-rise building in Chicago, and I walked out into the middle of the street to admire this absolutely beautiful gray Lamborghini that was actually Christian’s in the film. It looked like it was my car, and it looked like I was dressed to match it [because he was wearing a gray suit], and what happened was there were a lot of extras there [who] I think were going online and selling stories and circulating photos.”
Hall added: “So the next you know, people thought I was playing the Riddler, that I had a cooler role than I actually did. It was actually my mother who called me the next day, on a day off, and said, ‘There’s all this stuff online and these pictures of you standing next to a Lamborghini.’ So it was actually very inadvertent. But I was very happy to hear that there was talk online, I guess with Batman fans suggesting that maybe I was playing the Riddler. I wish I was, you know? I wish I was Batman, to be honest with you, but I think Christian has it locked up.” The Dark Knight opens July 18. –Ian Spelling
