With pre-production well underway, hopefully, The Batman Part 2 takes advantage of its status as a direct sequel and continues Batman’s development into a new kind of hero. We already know for sure that the film is expanding its roster of supporting characters, introducing Sebastian Stan as Harvey Dent and Scarlett Johansson as his wife, Gilda. Even though everyone knows that Harvey’s ultimate fate is to become the villainous Two-Face, some new confirmed casting implies that, ironically enough, we’ll get to witness the character’s origin firsthand in a way we never did with Bruce – an origin that has never properly been adapted on the big screen.
Recently, Deadline reported that veteran actor Charles Dance is in final talks to portray Christopher Dent, Harvey’s father and an important character who has never been adapted in a live-action DC film before. Dance, best known for playing Tywin Lannister (another terrible father from HBO’s Game of Thrones), is the latest in a line of potential castings for the character that have included Viggo Mortensen and Daniel Craig. While Christopher Dent isn’t exactly a recurring supporting character in the Batman mythos, his few appearances are crucial in contextualizing why Harvey turns out the way he does.
In the comics, Christopher Dent (who first appeared in 1990’s Batman Annual #14) is a violent alcoholic who suffers from undiagnosed dissociative identity disorder, abusing Harvey as a child by flipping a coin to decide whether or not he'd beat his son for minor infractions. He’s not a character who shows up all that frequently, but DC’s modern continuity has established that the Dent family descends from a long line of lawyers and politicians who have shaped Gotham City’s history in their own way, Christopher included. The abuse Harvey suffered at the hands of his father resulted in him developing a split-personality of his own, a ruthless and aggressively overprotective one that would eventually subside as Harvey grew up and got out from under his father’s thumb, only to reappear after the accident that would turn him into Two-Face — in a twisted way, Christopher is Harvey’s own Thomas Wayne.
There are only two live-action adaptations that have ever tried to engage with Christopher Dent’s presence or Harvey’s early struggles with DID: the Arkham games and Batman: The Animated Series. Reeves has a great opportunity to be the first filmmaker to wrestle with the tragic childhood complications of Harvey’s backstory, and could specifically emphasize the parallels between his difficult upbringing and Bruce’s comfortable life, which could create some dual-sided conflict between the characters if Harvey resents Bruce’s privilege while also working with Batman.
Even though Christopher Dent is deceased in the source material, there’s no indication that Reeves will go the same route. Alongside being the abuser responsible for Harvey’s fractured psyche, there’s a chance that Christopher could still be around and somehow still ingratiated in Gotham’s political infrastructure, still manipulating his son for his own ends (there’s even been fan speculation that Harvey’s father could be a part of the Court of Owls).
Alongside the many surprises that The Batman Part 2 will have in store, hopefully, it also delivers the kind of thoughtful, complex origin story for one of Batman’s greatest rogues that previous depictions have always fallen short of.
