BY G. CONNOR SALTER

Recently, Warner Bros. made Kevin Conroy: I Am the Knight, a 2023 three documentary about the late Batman actor Kevin Conroy, available for free on YouTube. In September, we will also see a documentary in theaters about one of his classmates from Julliard. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story tells the story of Christopher Reeve, a Julliard classmate who played Superman.

Sadly, since neither Conroy nor Reeve wrote much about their college days, we have few details about their time together at Julliard. I couldn’t find any stories about Conroy in Reeve’s autobiography Still Me. The most information I’ve been able to locate is Conroy saying on his Twitter page on May 22, 2018, that they almost roomed together.

“Wasn’t he incredible? I knew him at Juilliard. GREAT GUY. We discussed room-mating but I couldn’t swing his fancy soho rent. So I ended up with Robin Williams in an apartment where we divided up space with half-walls to save money. (Not s lot of privacy though).” — Kevin Conroy, May 22, 2018, Twitter/X

As Troy Peterson noted, Williams was Reeve’s freshman-year roommate. It’s a shame we’ll never see a book in which Conroy and Reeve talk about their Julliard days, their memories of Williams, or the fact they sometimes played the same roles. Conroy played Clifford Anderson in the 1978-1970 Broadway run of Death Trap opposite Brian Bedford. Reeve played the same character in the 1982 movie version opposite Michael Caine.

Mostly, though, it’s a shame that no one ever got them together on a chat show or podcast to talk about their experiences playing superheroes. They had more in common than one would expect.

Given their classically trained background—as Conroy observed in an interview with Joel Murphy, he was in the last group trained by John Houseman, including classical elements like French mask work—it’s not surprising that Reeve and Conroy had similar reservations about going from stage acting to playing superheroes. In 1979, Reeve told Los Angeles Times writer Wayne Wargara about an awkward dinner with his father, who assumed his son was appearing in the George Bernard Shaw play Man and Superman. Conroy described how when his agent contacted him about Batman: The Animated Series, he initially wasn’t interested since he was a stage actor. Talking with Michael Rosenbaum (his colleague on the Justice League cartoon series), he commented on how odd the casting seemed.

“What was the likelihood that a New York actor who primarily did classics—I worked for Joe Papp at the Public, San Diego Shakespeare, Hartford stage, I did a lot of regional theater, on Broadway and off-Broadway—what were the odds of the first animated audition he’s invited to do, is the animation of Batman? The first audition I went on for a voiceover!” – “KEVIN CONROY talks Anxiety, Traumatic Childhood, and Robin Williams,” Inside of You, August 11, 2020

Despite reservations, both brought professionalism and sincerity to their roles. As Richard M. Patton put it, “It’s no mistake that two actors so dedicated to the craft delivered the definitive performances of their heroes.” Certainly, there are moments where Reeve gets to play Superman like a stage role: the restored Richard Donner footage for Superman II includes Reeve debating with Marlon Brando’s Jor-El about whether he can give up his powers, their dialogue awash with biblical overtones. The scenes could almost work as a two-person play. In I Am the Knight, Paul Dini and casting director Andrea Romano describe how Conroy approached Batman as a Hamlet-like role.

They even seem to have taken similar approaches to their characters. Tom Mankiewicz reportedly says in his commentary for Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut that he believes Reeve played Superman as the character and Clark Kent as the persona that Superman plays. Reeve seems to allude to this approach in interviews quoted in The Great Superman Book, where he talks about how he thinks Superman plays Kent:

“The character has to be more than a disguise. All that stuff in Smallville, the upbringing, life on a farm… Superman uses that early life to inform Clark’s character.”

 Conroy also took the view that the superhero was the real person, their everyday side a character that the superhero plays.

“I told Bruce [Timm] and Paul [Dini] from the beginning, I thought Batman was the real character and Bruce Wayne is the disguise. That’s the face he puts on for the world. Batman is who he is in his heart.” – interview for “Batman: The Legacy Continues” (Batman: The Animated Series Volume 1. Warner Bros, 2004)

So, they had similar backgrounds, similar reservations about playing the character, and even similar approaches. But different results.

Reeve played Superman in four movies and had mixed feelings about its effect on his career, at least the effect of the final film. In Still Me, he wrote, “Superman IV was simply a catastrophe from start to finish. That failure was a huge blow to my career.” To the best of my knowledge, he was never approached about doing Superman’s voice in any animated series. If he chafed against the role’s effect on his career, his time playing Dr. Virgil Swann on the TV show Smallville showed he had grown beyond those concerns. The cast’s oral history interviews for Hollywood Reporter described him as kind and supportive, even telling Tom Welling it was a mistake he didn’t get cast in Superman Returns. Playing a superhero may have ruined Reeve’s hopes to be known as a classical stage actor, but he apparently made peace with his legacy over time.

If Conroy had any concerns about playing a superhero damaging his stage career, he hid it well. After 1992, except for the occasional TV movie or TV show guest spot appearance (The Daly Show, The Office [no, not that one]]), he focused on theater work and voice acting. Usually acting as Batman (in cartoons, video games, and animated films) but also playing roles like Mer-Man and Hordak in the Netflix Masters of the Universe reboots. His final live-action TV role was playing Batman in Batwoman, one of the later episodes where the show connected with other shows in the Arrowverse (The Flash, Arrow, Supergirl, etc.). Reeve’s Superman got a final appearance in the Arrowverse as a CGI recreation, although it never intersected with Conroy’s scenes. Another perhaps missed opportunity.

So, one actor found playing a superhero was good, but not an experience he kept returning to. The other made it into a lifelong vocation.

So, what’s the difference? Why was their trajectory different?

Certainly, there’s a difference between playing a character’s voice and playing them in person. Once Reeve had played Superman in a movie, there was no end to him being identified as Superman in everyday interactions. In contrast, while hardcore fans of DC animated shows knew Kevin Conroy by sight, the average person was unlikely to stop him on the street and say, “Oh, you’re Batman.”

There is also the question of how the actor personally relates to the role, which can have negative or positive consequences. In an earlier article discussing Christopher Reeve and Hugh Jackman, I suggested that what made Reeve a good Superman was a combination of great acting and having a personality that fit the great role. He had a core of gentlemanly behavior (niceness, consistency) in his private life that translated to the screen. As Mankiewicz said in a Newsarama interview with Daniel Robert Epstein, Reeve “was the nicest guy in the world and such an idealist.”

However, that idealism had consequences. Mankiewicz sees Reeve’s idealism as the reason he pursued making a Superman movie about nuclear disarmament, even though it was a flawed project from the beginning. It may also explain why, in the 1970s-1980s, Reeve turned down several commercial-sounding roles that made other actors famous (he was offered the parts that Mel Gibson played in Lethal Weapon and The Bounty). It definitely explains why, even before his 1995 accident, he was limiting his career by not moving to California so he could focus on his family. Living like Superman, striving for excellence and consistency, is not necessarily a strategy for a longtime action movie star career.

As Radomski and Romano note in I Am the Knight, Conroy’s life also informed his portrayal. He often drew on past pain in recording sessions to play the character. The darkness had many factors. In “Finding Batman,” a short memoir of his life illustrated by Kevin J. Bone, Conroy described the struggle to hide his sexuality from his devout Catholic family. The fact that his family consisted of “a wildly alcoholic father, a schizophrenic brother, and parents divorcing” added extra trauma. His father attempted suicide when Conroy was 16. Throughout the 1980s, as Conroy worked as a New York stage actor and the AIDS crisis became national news, he struggled with how to hide his personal life.

All these struggles meant it was “oddly appropriate” that Conroy was cast as Batman, a man hiding secrets. Sometimes, it provided healing and community: when talking with Rosenbaum, he recalled Romano supporting him during a recording session where he emotionally recalled the night his father attempted suicide. He also found it brought healing to others in surprising ways. In his commentary for Batman: Gotham Knight, he recalls cooking food to 9/11 emergency personnel, who cheered after he called out one of his famous Batman lines: “I am vengeance! I am the night! I am Batman!” Living like Batman, having pain and seeking ways to exorcise it, proved a good strategy when he found a character to which he could return.

Having a personal connection to their characters, and that connection having effects they probably didn’t expect, goes a long way to explaining why Conroy and Reeve took different journeys as superhero actors. However, any actor knows there’s also a timing element: being in the right place at the right time can make or break a career. Given how key timing is a good acting career, it’s worth remembering that Conroy playing a superhero in the early 1990s gave him opportunities that, sadly, Reeve never had.

First, Conroy had a fairly consistent team (showrunner Bruce Timm, casting Andrea Romano, writer/producers Alan Burnett and Paul Dini), giving him consistently good material to work with. Playing Batman in 65 animated episodes, each 22 minutes long, may not be Shakespeare, but they gave Conroy better material than any other superhero cartoon of its time. That team’s efforts directed the DC Animated Universe (DCAU) from 1992 to 2006, and while Batman: The Animated Series was the most innovative, the shows’ quality stayed fairly strong in that 13 years. Sadly, that kind of consistency didn’t appear in the Superman franchise; much has been said about Richard Donner’s firing halfway through filming Superman II and how it led to quality issues from that film onward.

Conroy also got a chance that Reeve never got: playing a growing character for years in a roughly continuous storyline. While the four Superman films are a connected series, the rewrites on Superman II (changing out Superman’s father for his mother, giving Superman strange new powers to explain new plot twists) mean that the series doesn’t really feel interconnected. At a certain point, it becomes more useful to see Reeve playing Superman in four disconnected movies than seeing them as a storyline where his character grows and expands.

In contrast, the sequels and spinoffs from Batman: The Animated Series were all loosely connected to it and each other. The interconnected storyline allowed Conroy to expand on his character in a roughly chronological journey. The Superman: The Animated Series guest spots and appearances in both Justice League shows let him play a Batman who is somewhat more mature—more willing to work with others, perhaps happier to have friends than he would admit—than the insular hero he started playing in 1992. Batman Beyond allowed him to go a generation into the future, playing an older and wiser version of the character.

In this respect, Conroy’s experience playing Batman may be closest to what actors like Robert Downey Jr. got to do in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—playing a character over a decade or more, watching them grow. Granted, these animations never had the budget or hype of the Marvel movies. Some may feel it’s unfair to compare the two products (although fans certainly have on Comic Book Resources forums and elsewhere). However, the choice to do a continuous, well-told storyline means that the DCAU anticipated what Marvel did so efficiently. It meant that over a decade before Iron Man, Conroy could play a growing superhero—an opportunity that Reeve didn’t have because no one was trying a shared superhero universe in the 1970s.

Perhaps most importantly, the perception of what you could do with a superhero cartoon or movie shifted in the 10 years between Reeve making Superman in 1978 and Conroy making Batman: The Animated Series in 1992. In the late 1970s, the closest model for superhero movies was the Adam West movie spinoff from the TV show. This directly affects the movie. As Gene Siskel observed in his review of Superman on Siskel and Ebert, the movie’s low point is how much Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor resembles an Adam West-style camp villain.

Sadly, the expectation that superhero entertainment had to be silly continued for another decade. The documentary The Heart of Batman discusses how much Timm and other animators chafed in the late 1970s through the 1980s against expectations that cartoons had to be as tame as Super Friends. Censorship, Reagan-era conservatism (and some other factors I discuss in an article for The Tolkienist about Ralph Bakshi) kept animation feeble until the early 1990s. Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989 broke that standard, and the team behind Batman: The Animated Series took advantage of the new possibilities to make superhero stories dark. As producer Michael Uslan observed in I Am the Knight, the show proved that “there is a market for intelligent superhero animation marketed and aimed at an older audience that doesn’t shut out the younger generation.”

It still wasn’t easy; Timm comments in The Heart of Batman that there were many days when he fought with executives and went home sure he would be fired the next day. But the willingness to break old norms paid off. From there, the DCAU continued to develop with more sophistication. Granted, there were low moments; Batman Beyond never fully took advantage of its cyberpunk setting. However, as the big storyline developed and the characters got to know each other, it led to darker tales. The second season of Justice League Unlimited (planned as its final season, the capstone to everything) asks tough questions about the characters’ flaws and doesn’t always resolve them. It manages some topical post-9/11 commentary about government shadow cabinets and privacy invasion. The DCAU never achieved the gore or moral complexity of something like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns but was consistently more complex than Super Friends. It gave Conroy room to do things with a superhero role that Reeve never got to explore.

Even after the DCAU wrapped up, Conroy could explore Batman in other ways—playing the character in other tones for other properties. For example, Jim Krieg notes how Conroy playing Batman in Justice League Action let him play a straight man in a comic situation, more humorous than the earlier Batman shows he worked on.

We lost Christopher Reeve and Kevin Conway both too soon. They each gave great performances that arguably set definitive templates for how to play those heroes. Despite various TV shows and movie reboots, no Superman actor has touched Reeve’s legacy. While Batman animated entertainment will continue, it’s hard to imagine anyone surpassing Conroy’s performance. It’s telling that the recent trailer for Batman: The Caped Crusader, an animated show that Timm promises will be “more Batman: The Animated Series than Batman: The Animated Series,” shows Hamish Linklater doing a very Conroyesque Batman voice. Some things can’t be surpassed.

While playing a comic book character has very different overtones than it did in the 1970s or the 1990s, the fact that Reeve and Conroy both brought such a serious theater sensibility to their characters proved one thing that remains very true. Playing a superhero may not be Shakespeare, but it pays to treat superhero material as serious stuff.

(Originally published July 2, 2024 on Fellowship & Fairydust)