‘Playing Batman Villains Drove Actors Mad’ (Is A Lie That Needs To Stop)

Folks on Twitter mass-dunked on Dano for taking a role once played by a spandex-clad Jim Carrey so seriously, while a ton of other media outlets ran with the whole “playing a Batman villain drives you to the very brink of madness from which you shant return” angle.

The only problem is, that’s a wild misrepresentation of what Dano actually said. In the original interview, he merely stated that: ”There were some nights … that I probably didn’t sleep as well as I would’ve wanted to just because it was a little hard to come down from this character.” In other words, playing the Riddler is exactly as disruptive as a late night burrito.

And the reason why Dano had a wee bit of trouble dozing a few times had nothing to do with the reservoir of evil he had tapped into, it was simply that playing the character took “a lot of energy” – which is entirely fair. Most egregiously, Entertainment Tonight conflated that sleep quote with another part of the same interview in which Dano confessed that he was “scared of what was happening in my head.”

But he was talking about his literal head, specifically how it was “throbbing” from the “sweat and the heat and the lack of oxygen” since his costume basically consisted of wearing a leather handbag with eye holes at all times.