Batman Legend : Kevin Conroy

Kevin Conroy: I got out of Juilliard when I was 21. I did the acting company for a year and then I did, um, the Broadway tour of Death Trap, um, for a year around the country, uh, starring in it with Brian Bedford. And, and at the end of that tour playing at the in Boston at the Wilbur Theater, um, I was cast in Another World in New York, which was my first TV job, but there was a like a six-week overlap in the jobs. So I, I couldn’t turn down the TV job because the money was incredible. Yeah.But I obviously had to honor my commitment to the tour that I was still in, so I got the TV producers to guarantee that I would be out by a certain time every day of filming because it filmed in the studios in Brooklyn. What was I doing? I think I was taking the last shuttle down after the shows at night, like an 11 o’clock shuttle from Boston, cause it’s only about a 45 minute flight or a 40 minute flight. And then um go to the studio at, you know, 6 a.M. The next morning and then after the recording, take a cab directly from the Brooklyn studio to the shuttle at LaGuardia and get up for the evening show.Wow. I did that for 6 weeks and there were a couple of days that it was really, really close.

I was actually the only exposure I had had to Batman, to be honest, was the Adam West series, right, right, late 60s, I guess, early 70s. And when I went into the audition, the producers asked Bruce Tim and Paul Dini asked me what I knew about it and I said, well, I, you know, I used to watch the show when I was a kid with Adam West and they said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, this is nothing like that. Get, get that out of your head completely.This is film noir, very dark. Tragic story, you know, loses both his parents as a child, he’s raised by the butler, he’s living a life of torture and alone in the caves and double identity, and lives to avenge his parents’ death and I said, well, I come from the stage background and you’ve just described the story of Hamlet. That’s right. Isn’t that the truth? And they said, well, no one’s ever said that before. I said, look, I, I’m totally unfamiliar with this, so let me just use my imagination and put myself in that situation.And, and as I was in the booth, I just, you know, my voice get darker and huskier, and I went to a place where I just, you know, it seemed an appropriate sound for that. And as I was coming up with the sound. Everyone got really still in the in the booth and then everyone started running around and I thought, well, I’ve either done something really right or really wrong. I’m either on the nose or I’m awful because there was a big reaction in there. Because I see Batman as his true identity. And the Bruce Wayne character as his alter ego, that he, the persona he assumes to deal with the world, just like we all do. I think that’s why he’s so appealing to, to audiences for so many generations because It really strikes a chord with people that everyone has a a private self and a public self. Everyone has a private face that only their most intimate friends see, you know, or their partner or their wife or their husband, and the rest of the world, you know, you put on your suit and your tie and your coat, and you know, you get ready to face the world.You put on your armor, so to speak, to deal with the world. Batman’s armor is Bruce Wayne.Yeah. And it’s a very, very sophisticated armor.
It’s a very adept to, to, to, to assume the role of a social dilettante. In fact, in the early episodes, I used a voice for the these never aired. Um, for Bruce Wayne, there was much more A dilettante. It was much more sophisticated upper crust, slightly lock jawed, slightly playing, you know, a lot more color to it. No, you know, this and that, making it sound like a real rich guy, which they loved and it was interesting because it made it a strong distinction between the private and public self.But then when they decided to have the color tone of the show be so dark, we actually went back and re-recorded those 1st 3 episodes. Just the Bruce Wayne voice to make it closer to the Batman voice, so it wasn’t as so so stark a difference. But you know, actors always like to make their jobs more complicated, so it was fun.