Did Nolan Manage to Sneak The Riddler Into The Dark Knight, and Nobody Noticed?
Every film of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy had multiple antagonists from Batman's rogue gallery in it.
Batman Begins included The Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy ), Ra's al Ghul (Liam Neeson), and Victor Zsasz (Tim Booth), while The Dark Knight Rises featured Bane (Tom Hardy ), Catwoman (Anne Hathaway ) and Talia al Ghul (Marion Cotillard).
And in The Dark Knight, Batman, as everyone knows, had to confront both The Joker ( Heath Ledger) and Harvey Dent/Two-Face (Aaron Eckhart). But what if we told you that Nolan included another iconic Batman villain in that movie, even if his appearance was more of an Easter egg for perceptive fans?
Take a look at the nebbish Wayne Enterprise accountant, Coleman Reese (Joshua Harto). By finding the discrepancies in Bruce Wayne's financial accounts, he managed to figure out that Bruce Wayne is Batman, and attempted to blackmail him, with rather poor results.
As it happens "a nerd working in Wayne Enterprise, coming into a conflict with Bruce Wayne that ends poorly for him (before deciding to deal with his frustrations by becoming a supervillain)" is a common backstory of another well-known Batman antagonist – The Riddler. In particular, that was The Riddler's origin in Batman Forever (1995).
But similarities do not end there. Reese has pale skin and red hair, as do all modern incarnations of The Riddler in every medium (including above-mentioned Batman Forever and 2022's The Batman).
His business suit has a green tinge (though slight), and his tie is unmistakably purple — green and purple are the signature colors of The Riddler. His real name is not Edward Nigma, as is the case for all the Riddlers in various stories, but it includes a similar portmanteau with "Mr. Reese" sounding like "Mysteries."
And, like several versions of The Riddler, Reese manages to uncover Batman's true identity (again, happened in Batman Forever, and in the comics too). The main thing missing to make him unmistakably The Riddler is discarding his normal incapable and timid persona and going full supervillain. It is as if Nolan placed his character into the trilogy as a seed of a potential plot line that did not get used in the end.