Gotham: Cory Michael Smith Loves Nygma’s Diversity

Cory Michael Smith plays the mild-mannered forensic examiner who will eventually become Batman Super Villain Edward Nygma on Gotham! Cory Michael Smith actually didn’t have a whole lot of knowledge about Batman or Riddler before auditioning for the role, but researching it while auditioning, he found his favorite trait of the Riddler was actually how inconsistent he’s been over the decades.

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"What I love about [the character’s history] is how diverse it is in terms of how the character is portrayed, in terms of his appearance, the different costumes and hair color. Sometimes it’s incredibly ostentatious, other times it’s almost professional, or regal. Sometimes, he’s a showman, sometimes he’s a nerd."

Cory Michael Smith also went into pretty good detail about Nygma’s turn to villainy:

"What I’m really excited about is the bottom of that curve. Going from this quite innocent, well-intentioned, joyful person to starting to find this other part of him that he didn’t know he had — accessing this place where he responds to the unfortunate things that people are doing to him, and starting to realize how cruel people are to him and how they mistreat him, and then doing that back to them. He’s a person who’s constantly abused, and to finally reach a part of himself where he just can’t take it anymore and starts doing it to other people — and it’s out of anger and exhaustion, and then realizing that when you start taking control of situations like that, you can gain power that way — it’ll be something that he can start to enjoy. [Once he] slips up the other side of the U as this completely other person because he’s finally realized how to harness power, he’s going to have a great time with it,” he says. That’s how you end up with the Riddler, who is this very joyful villain."

Keep watching Cory Michael Smith portray Edward Nygma’s turn to the dark side on Gotham Mondays on Fox!

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