Even supervillains have their downtime. In the new superhero movie The Batman, Paul Dano plays the Riddler, a more demented version of the green-clad supervillain from Batman’s Rogues Gallery. While he’s more murderous and sadistic than previous versions of Riddler, what Dano’s incarnation has in common with the others is an obsessive love for puzzles. With this in mind, some fans may wonder if the Riddler plays Wordle, the popular web-based word game wherein players have six attempts to guess a five-letter word.
The question has now made its way to Dano himself in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. The actor is willing to entertain the idea that his Riddler plays Wordle and explains how these kinds of mind games would indeed be something the character would use as a way of finding validation for his own perceived brilliance. Dano can’t say for certain that the Riddler is literally playing Wordle off-camera during the events of The Batman, but that he probably would have been playing the game if it exists in The Bat-verse, or at least be completing similar mind puzzles.
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Of course, fans will get to see what the Riddler is really made of when The Batman is finally released this week. The film presents Dano’s Riddler as the primary supervillain as Colin Farrell’s Penguin has much more limited screen time, though he’ll be getting his own HBO Max series. The Batman will be the Riddler’s time to shine, and many of the film’s critics who got to watch the movie early have particularly praised the actor’s performance.
“This is a guy who survived by finding a way to focus his brain on something apart from his own thoughts and trauma and pain. That actually was very important to my backstory — not Wordle, literally — but the idea that puzzles were the only place that he would be given any form of positive feedback in his life. They were the only thing that ever said to him in his whole life, ‘You win.’"
The Batman Brings the Riddler Back to the Big Screen
Paul Dano addressed the previous live-action Riddler we saw on the big screen with Jim Carrey playing the role in Batman Forever. Dano says he’s a fan of that character and that certain elements of that portrayal helped inspire his own performance. But the actor still knew he had to bring something different with his portrayal, finding the right balance for a darker Riddler that we’ll meet in The Batman.
One key difference is that this Riddler spends the majority of the film totally masked. Dano said how putting on the mask for the first time made him feel “power,” as “you don’t want the person wearing that mask walking toward you… And for somebody [like the Riddler] who felt powerless in their life, that’s a big feeling to be given.”
Matt Reeves directed The Batman. The film also stars Robert Pattinson, Zoe Kravitz, Colin Farrell, John Turturro, Andy Serkis, Jeffrey Wright, and Peter Sarsgaard. It will be released in the United States on March 4, 2022.
