(Warning: This post contains spoilers for Thursday’s episode of “Gotham,” titled “Pena Dura.”)
Tonight, “Gotham” fans were rewarded with the long-awaited appearance of Shane West’s Eduardo Dorrance — aka the man who will become fan-favorite Batman villain Bane — on Fox’s Dark Knight prequel series. And it looks like he got here just in time, as West tells TheWrap his character will be responsible for triggering the long-awaited appearance of Batman himself during the show’s current fifth and final season.
As viewers who tuned in for Thursday’s episode, titled “Pena Dura,” know, Dorrance may already be a bad guy — based on that last-minute twist and turn on his old military pal Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie) — but he’s not going after young Bruce Wayne (played by David Mazouz) just yet.
“We flip things around — which will make people squirm or love it,” West says in the interview above. “But we flip things around because of how they’ve set the tone of the show of, where, he’s not fighting Batman so much as he was in the comic book, because Batman is still not Batman yet — he’s still a kid.”
“So there is some fun little stuff that I can tease where I have to deal with Alfred instead,” West continued. “There’s a lot of interesting ‘breaking the Bat’ that goes somewhere else. I am the person to get confronted by bats for the first time, if that kind of gives you a nice tease as well, which I think was really well done.”
West says what happens with Bane in the coming episodes “ends up being the catalyst to make Bruce Wayne essentially assume the fact that he is going to have to be the Dark Knight — and it’s going to lead up to that.”
Watch this portion of our interview with West above and check out the actor’s take on his Bane voice and suit here.
“Gotham” airs Thursdays at 8/7c on Fox.