The Batman’s Paul Dano Had Trouble Sleeping Because Of The Riddler’s ‘Intense’ Scenes

The Batman villain Paul Dano had trouble sleeping while playing The Riddler.

During an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the 37-year-old Batman villain explained why he found it difficult to “come down” from the role.

“There’s a sequence with Peter Sarsgaard’s character [Gotham district attorney Gil Colson]. That was intense,” said Dano. “There were some nights around 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. It takes a lot of energy to get there. And so, you almost have to sustain it once you’re there because going up and down is kind of hard.”

It sounds as though The Batman was an intense experience all round.

After all, the Batman himself, Robert Pattinson, spent a long time working on his Bat-voice, spending hours on set in the Bat-suit.

And Paul Dano had some troubles with his costume, too. Dano himself pitched the idea of The Riddler covering himself from head to toe in plastic wrap, to avoid leaving DNA evidence at his crime scenes. Director Matt Reeves loved it… but it looks as though Dano made a rod for his own back.

“My head was just throbbing with heat,” he explained. “I went home that night, after the first full day in that, and I almost couldn’t sleep because I was scared of what was happening to my head. It was like compressed from the sweat and the heat and the lack of oxygen. It was a crazy feeling.”

Thankfully, the costume department made some modifications that made it easier to breathe inside his Riddler costume.

But Reeves loved the idea of the Riddler as a vigilante in this villain’s origin story.

“The Riddler is omnipresent, but almost as a ghost,” said Reeves. “When I came up with the idea that the Riddler would be sending correspondence to Batman, [what] was captivating to me was if you’re a character whose mode is to work as a symbol, be anonymous, to come out of the shadows, nobody is supposed to know who you are; your power comes from the fact that you’re anonymous. Then suddenly someone starts to rob you of your anonymity, you start to lose a bit of your power and it starts to unsettle you.”

“The flip side of that is that by withholding the Riddler, he had more power,” he added. “He was more unsettling. He felt like a ghost throughout the whole movie, this kind of presence that you never knew where he would show up and how he was affecting things. And that that mystery would put Batman in a very vulnerable position because he didn’t understand from where and how and what the Riddler was acting.”

Robert Pattinson stars as The Batman alongside Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman, Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth, Jeffrey Wright as James Gordon, Colin Farrell as The Penguin, and Paul Dano as The Riddler.

The Batman is directed by Matt Reeves, based on a screenplay he co-wrote with Peter Craig.

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.