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September 8, 2008


Either Michael Caine believes all the Batman 3 casting gossip that he reads in the British tabloids, or he knows something we don't.

Well, now we know it, too, because he's blabbed about it.

In a chat with MTV, the actor who portrays Alfred the butler in Christopher Nolan's Batman films said, "They've already got (the villains) in mind. ... It's Johnny Depp as The Riddler. And The Penguin is Philip Seymour Hoffman. I read it in the paper."

But before you completely dismiss this comment as a glib throwaway line, Caine revealed, ""I was with [a Warner Bros.] executive and I said, 'Are we going to make another one?' They said yeah. I said, 'How the hell are we going to top Heath [Ledger as The Joker]? And he says 'I'll tell you how you top Heath — Johnny Depp as The Riddler and Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Penguin.' I said, '(Expletive), they've done it again!'"

The Comic Book Cynic recently pointed out that Depp addressed the Riddler rumors during a radio interview, saying, "I heard about that. Not that I know of. ... It seems like it'd be a fun gig for a while, yeah."

And when asked about the Penguin rumors at the Toronto International Film Festival, Hoffman advised The Stone Report, "I don't think so." But then Hoffman admitted that he was a comic book fan growing up and added, "I think what they're doing with that whole Batman story is really true to what that whole Batman thing has always been. It's one of the darkest origins of a superhero, to get all nerdy and geeky on you. That character sees his parents gunned down as a young child: I remember when I was a kid reading that story, so seeing it now come to life as the dark tale that it really is as an intense, really dark, very visceral, adult tale that they're doing now, all the great work people are doing on it, of course I wouldn't say, 'Well, no, no no.' But I don't know the reality of it, so I wouldn't say 'yes' to you."