The Batman makeup designer Naomi Donne recently explained how she perfected Robert Pattinson's dark eye shadow look in the movie. Directed by Matt Reeves, The Batman focuses on a darker, grittier side of Bruce Wayne as he struggles to separate himself from his crime-fighting alter ego in his early years as the Caped Crusader. Pattinson's new take on the iconic DC character was largely inspired by the late Nirvana frontman, Kurt Cobain, with Reeves' saying he regularly listened to the band's music while writing The Batman.
Pattinson is far from the first actor to portray the Dark Knight onscreen, but his take on the character does something none of his predecessors have done before: he wears a heavy smokey eye when his cowl comes off. In the film, Bruce can be seen wearing dark, smudged makeup around his eyes whenever he removes his suit. The eye makeup serves a more practical purpose for Bruce beyond its grungy aesthetic, however. As Bruce aims to hide his identity as the Batman, the eyeshadow supports the already ominous black cowl in shrouding his face. Other live-action Batman actors have also sported similar raccoon eye-style makeup, but The Batman is the first to recognize that the eye shadow doesn't simply disappear the moment Bruce takes his costume off.
While speaking with Polygon, Donne further discussed how Reeves was largely inspired by Cobain when creating his Batman. Keeping with this, she created dark eyeliner looks for Pattinson's portrayal. According to Donne, achieving the look was a process of trial and error, and that between The Batman's rainy setting and intense action scenes, the makeup needed to stay in place. The end result was a combination of pigment, a creamy eyeliner, and a liquid paint makeup that gave Batman his perfectly grungy emo look. Read Donne's full quote below:
“Matt was really keen that there were remains of [the eye makeup] when he took his cowl off, so we pushed that. We actually took the cowl off and looked at what was left, and we used that. It’s really hard to get black eye makeup off, and we used that. And then, to brighten it up, we used this lightly sparkly pigment to give it a bit of light, so that it reflected lights in the same way his Batsuit would’ve.”
It seems that Pattinson's grungy Batman look wasn't entirely character-driven. Donne admitted that "it also looked dead sexy," and that "men in black eye makeup look really good.” However, beyond Bruce's surface-level good looks, Donne also added an interesting point, explaining that the smudged eyeliner also acts a larger metaphor for the character's internal battle between being Batman and being a Wayne. She said, "At all times it was never clean. It always came from the remains of the cowl ... It was the way of Batman lingering in Bruce Wayne after he’s taken his costume off.”
It is curious to note how Reeves' vision for Bruce in The Batman found unique inspiration in '90s punk-rock culture. Cobain wasn't just a catalyst for Reeves' Batman look, either, as The Batman prominently features Nirvana's famous "Something In The Way" on its soundtrack. Ultimately, Donne and Reeves' use of dark makeup works well to represent a more tortured, anti-social version of Bruce, as opposed to the playboy millionaire seen in other iterations of the character. With a potential The Batman sequel likely to explore the later years of the vigilante's career if it goes ahead, it will be interesting to see whether Pattinson's dark eye makeup makes another appearance.
Source: Polygon