Jack Nicholson Had A Hand In Danny Devito Becoming The Penguin In Batman Returns
If there's anything "Batman Returns" is lacking, it ain't villains. Michelle Pfieffer's Catwoman and Christopher Walken's Max Shreck would have been enough of a challenge for the Dark Knight by themselves. But director Tim Burton wanted to make his second go-round with Batman one to remember, adding Danny DeVito as the Penguin to complete the movie's antagonist triumvirate.
DeVito took the role seriously, staying in character as the bile-spewing mutant version of the famous Batman villain throughout shooting. It was an approach that Pfieffer Pfieffer found "really creepy," with Burton saying that DeVito took the method approach so seriously that if anyone "put their fingers too close to his mouth, he might just take it off."
And while DeVito's commitment paid off, creating one of the most convincingly deranged and creepy villains we've yet had in a "Batman" movie, it almost didn't happen. In fact, the actor had never even considered playing the role until newspapers started prematurely claiming he'd been cast. But it would take a little more than fake reports and rumors to convince him to actually appear in "Batman Returns."
The Joker saves the day for once
As DeVito remembers it, newspapers started claiming he'd been cast as Penguin in the sequel to 1989's "Batman" before he'd even been contacted about the film:
"Michael Douglass and Kathleen Turner and I were together one morning for breakfast and Michael said 'look at this I see this thing in the newspaper that you're going to do the next 'Batman' movie, you're going to play the Penguin, and I said 'I've never talked to anybody about this, I've never heard about this.'"
Not only had DeVito not been approached for the role, he "resented the fact that they just put anything in the paper that they wanted to" and maintained that he wouldn't be playing Penguin. As the actor recalls, it was only after a meeting with Tim Burton a year later that he came around to the idea and got "hooked into what [Burton] was talking about."
But according to a TCM article, Burton had initially wanted Marlon Brando for the Penguin role. That idea was promptly shot down by Warner Bros. and Batman co-creator Bob Kane, so Burton and screenwriter Daniel Waters are said to have re-conceptualized the Penguin character to become more like the grotesque figure that eventually wound up in the film. DeVito then became the first choice, but as the report claims, it would take none other than Jack Nicholson, who previously starred as the Joker in "Batman," to convince his buddy to take the role — at least in part by pointing to the financial benefits of starring in a Batman movie.
Anyone else might take offense at becoming the first choice for a more deformed, unpleasant version of a main character. But it seems DeVito didn't see it that way, and the movie was all the better for it.