When Jeffrey Wright first stepped into Gotham City as Commissioner Jim Gordon in Matt Reeves’s The Batman (2022), he made history as the first Black actor to portray Batman’s trusted ally on the big screen.
His performance alongside Robert Pattinson’s brooding Caped Crusader earned praise from critics and audiences, helping bring Reeves’s noir-inspired vision of Gotham to life. But before the film even hit theaters, Wright received backlash rooted in racism.
In a new interview with Collider’s Therese Lacson, the Oscar nominee and American Fiction star reflected on the criticism, calling it both absurd and revealing of deeper cultural issues.
“The Gordon thing, that’s another level,” Wright said. “I guess increasingly now, I’m looking forward to getting back to it, but I really find it fascinating the ways in which there’s such a conversation, and I think even more of a conversation now, about Black characters in these roles. It’s just so f—ing racist and stupid. It’s just so blind in a way that I find revealing to not recognize that the evolution of these films reflects the evolution of society, that somehow it’s defiling this franchise not to keep it grounded in the cultural reality of 1939 when the comic books were first published. It’s just the dumbest thing. It’s absent all logic.”
For Wright, the controversy showed the resistance some fans still hold toward diversity in legacy roles, even when the rest of the fictional world has evolved.
While his Gordon followed in the footsteps of acclaimed performances by Gary Oldman in The Dark Knight trilogy and J.K. Simmons in Justice League, Reeves’s film offered a more grounded detective noir spin, pairing Gordon and Batman more directly as partners on the trail of Paul Dano’s Riddler.
The actor, with an acclaimed resume spanning Basquiat, Casino Royale, The Hunger Games, and his Emmy-winning performance in Angels in America, was unfazed by comparisons.
Still, he admits the criticism left him disappointed, not because it challenged his performance, but because it exposed the stubbornness of holding fictional characters hostage to outdated norms.
Despite the noise, Wright’s Gordon was praised as a vital piece of Reeves’s darker Gotham puzzle, and anticipation is already high for his return in The Batman Part II.
For Wright, the excitement of revisiting the role outweighs the ugliness of the backlash, but he hasn’t forgotten what it represents.
As he put it, “The evolution of these films reflects the evolution of society.”
The Batman Part II is scheduled to be released on October 1, 2027.
Photo Credit: Instagram – JeffreyWright
