By If you’ve ever wanted to watch a ten-part miniseries of Batman’s weird butler Alfred Pennyworth, the people behind television show Gotham have got you covered. Producers Bruno Heller and Danny Cannon have cast Jack Bannon (The Imitation Game) as a younger, hotter Alfred for an upcoming series on Epix called Pennyworth.
Bannon will be joined by Ben Aldridge (American Psycho: The Musical) as Thomas Wayne, him and Alfred both working together in the show’s setting of 1960s London long before billionaire and not-at-all-Batman Bruce Wayne was born. The description that EW is given for the young Alfred is as follows:
“[A] boyishly handsome, cheerful, charming, clever young man from London. Honest, open-faced and witty; you’d never take him for an SAS killer. Alfred doesn’t know how to reconcile the kind-hearted boy he used to be with the cold, calculated killer he was forced to become. He’s a man on the make, who doesn’t know what to make of himself yet.”
Long story short, they made him hot, I guess. I question who exactly this audience is for what feels like a prequel for a prequel, and I certainly don’t know a single person who even has an Epix subscription. Of course, this is coming from a person who has never seen Gotham or given it a chance, so perhaps this could work for fans of that show.
I am vaguely reminded of rumors back during the Andrew Garfield era of Spider-Man films that some sort of young Aunt May spy movie was in the works, an idea that I would have loved solely from the sheer nonsensicality of it. I still want the cowards at Sony to make that film one day (especially after Venom was so damn successful), and I hope Pennyworth, which starts production later this month, embraces some of that ridiculousness and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Let’s see some rubies the size of a tangerine.