When producer Michael E. Uslan first set out to cast a Batman movie in 1980, he had one actor in mind to play the role of the Joker, and that was…well, Jack Nicholson, actually. “From the beginning, I had taken the position, ardently, that Jack Nicholson was the only actor who could play the Joker,” Uslan said in a 2014 interview. “There’s a story I tell in my memoir: it was Memorial Day weekend, 1980 and I picked up the afternoon New York Post, which talked about two movies opening that weekend, one was The Empire Strikes Back and the other was a horror movie called The Shining. And there was the first time I had ever seen what was to become that iconic image of Jack Nicholson—the ‘Here’s Johnny’ shot. When I saw that, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is the Joker!’”
By the time Tim Burton signed on to direct the film a few years after that, Nicholson was still the top choice. Getting the actor to agree to play the Joker was a different story, however. Prior to landing Nicholson, the part was also offered to Robin Williams, who later said he believed the filmmakers reached out to him only so Nicholson would commit. In David Itzkoff’s 2018 biography, Robin, Williams is quoted as saying, “I replied, but they said I was too late. They said they’d gone to Jack over the weekend because I didn’t reply soon enough. I said, ‘You gave me till Monday, I replied before the deadline.’ But it was just to get Jack off the pot.”
Williams touched on the subject in a 1993 interview as well, where he suggested, “Maybe there’ll be something else down the line. Maybe the Riddler.” Interestingly enough, by the time Batman Forever was in the planning stages, Williams had been offered that exact part. Sources differ on why he didn’t end up doing it, though, with Entertainment Weekly reporting that Williams turned it down because he “believed the character was too intellectual and not as comedic as the Riddler played by Frank Gorshin on the TV series.” However, screenwriter Lee Batchler says otherwise. In 2015, he told The Hollywood Reporter, “With the Riddler, we wrote it with Robin’s voice. He read our script and loved it, they just didn’t make the deal.”
Batchler’s co-writer, Akiva Goldsman, went as far as to say that Williams was still attached to the movie when he first got involved. “I remember sort of this extraordinary day where Joel [Schumacher] sent me to San Francisco, and I spent the day in Robin’s kitchen and he just talking about the Riddler,” Goldsman told The Playlist in 2023. “Ultimately, he and Joel didn’t see eye to eye,” he continued. “Jim [Carrey] came on. Jim was amazing. Tommy Lee [Jones] had worked with Joel & I in ‘The Client.’ And off we went.”
Williams might never have gotten his chance to play either character, but he did throw his hat in the ring at least one other time. When Williams’s Insomnia collaborator, Christopher Nolan, came up during a 2010 interview with Empire Magazine, Williams had the following to say about the Batman Begins director: “I would work with Chris again in a second, playing anyone in anything. I’d play the Riddler in the next Batman, although it’d be hard to top Heath [Ledger] as the villain, and I’m a little hairy for tights. Plus, the Batman films have screwed me twice before: years ago they offered me the Joker and then gave it to Jack Nicholson, then they offered me the Riddler and gave it to Jim Carrey. I’d be like, ‘Okay, is this a real offer? If it is, then the answer’s yes. Don’t pump me again, motherf—ers.’”
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