Jeffrey Wright has called out the backlash he received from comic book fans over his casting as police commissioner James Gordon in Matt Reeves’ 2022 film The Batman.
Wright, 59, joined the project alongside British actor Robert Pattison in the title role, Zoe Kravtiz as Catwoman and Paul Dano as The Riddler.
The movie was a hit among critics who hailed the performances of the cast along with Reeves’ “detective noir” stylings. However, Wright was also the subject of discontent among some fans who argued that Gordon was not depicted as Black in the original comics, and that a Black actor should not play the leader of Gotham’s police force.
The character has previously been depicted by white actors such as Gary Oldman in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy.
Wright slammed the negative reception to his casting as “the dumbest thing”, telling Collider in a new interview: “I really find it fascinating the ways in which there’s such a conversation, and I think even more of a conversation now, about Black characters in these roles.
“It’s just so f***ing racist and stupid. It’s just so blind in a way that I find revealing to not recognise that the evolution of these films reflects the evolution of society, that somehow it’s defiling this franchise not to keep it grounded in the cultural reality of 1939 when the comic books were first published.”
“It’s just the dumbest thing,” he added. “It’s absent all logic.”
The DC native argued the Batman franchise is different from the original comics, and emulates real-world influences and has evolved since the franchise’s original publication.
"Obviously, New York City is the template for Gotham, and if you look around New York City in the Seventies, or if you look around New York City, of course, today, it’s a multicultural place,” he continued.
“So, any Gotham within a contemporary film in the Batman series that’s going to be authentic has to be reflective of a modern American metropolis. That’s just what it is."
In a four-star review for The Independent, critic Clarisse Loughrey praised Reeves for making the film a more “intimate” Batman adventure than the ones fans might have grown accustomed to.
“The Batman is a very good Batman film,” she said. “To think of it as anything more only leads to delusion or disappointment. It also undermines the more subtle work at play in Reeves’s film, which remains faithful to the character’s core iconography – bat ears, elaborate gadgets, encroaching darkness – while simultaneously interrogating its usefulness.
“Comparatively, it’s pitched somewhere between Christopher Nolan and Tim Burton – with one foot in our reality, and the other planted in a Gothic noir aesthetic derived partially from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One comics.”
The Batman Part II will begin filming Spring 2026.
