A ‘House Of The Dragon’ Actor Cast As The Joker, But Not In The DCU

House of the Dragon

Photograph by Courtesy of HBO

There are so many versions of Batman flying around right now, you could throw a batarang and hit one by accident. There’s Robert Pattinson’s Batman from The Batman universe. There’s whoever James Gunn is going to cast in the DCU, which remains a mystery and/or secret. And there is an animated Batman, seen more frequently than either.

We know that Barry Keoghan played The Joker, briefly, in The Batman, but there is no word that he will return. And with James Gunn’s propensity for more obscure characters, it’s unlikely Joker will show up in the DCU any time soon. Rather, the Joker is being added to Batman: Caped Crusader on Amazon for season 2, and it’s just cast its actor.

That would be House of the Dragon star Matthew Needham, who plays Larys Strong on House of the Dragon, currently tasked with dragging around Aegon for reasons that still remain elusive to me. That boy is not going to become king again.

The news of Joker’s casting was confirmed at a Caped Crusader panel at San Diego Comic-Con. We’ve previously seen Joker teased in a Caped Crusader season 2 trailer, but now Matthew Needham has been confirmed as the actor. As you may expect, given his casting in House of the Dragon, Needham is British, but sheds the accent for this part.

Needham joins a long list of Joker voice actors, which most famously is led by Mark Hamill. But we’ve also seen Troy Baker and Kevin Michael Richardson play him, and Alan Tudyk has done a hilarious job in Harley Quinn.

Joker being added to Caped Crusader will put him on a list of “modified” villains that the show is reinterpreting for the series set decades in the past. So far we’ve seen Penguin, Two-Face, Catwoman, Clayface and more in the series, along with more obscure ones like Gentleman Ghost and Onomatopoeia.

Given that the role is voicework in an unknown number of episodes, this certainly doesn’t mean that Larys Strong is being killed off in House of the Dragon. I mean, maybe he is, I didn’t read the source material, but it’s not like he’s taking the leading role in another show. Rather, his misadventures are likely to continue on this season.

Batman: Caped Crusader is out next week on July 31. The show has drastically divided critics and audiences with a 94% and 55% respectively, some fans do not appreciate all the revisions of classic characters. We’ll see how Joker goes over.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.