This story is a complete oral history of the beginning of Gotham and as such is quite long. We'd love for you to read the whole piece, but if you need to jump between sections, use the table of contents on the right of your screen.
By all rights, Gotham is a show that should not have existed. A Batman show, without Batman. A network series unconnected from the growing slate of interconnected superhero universes. An arch, gothic, gritty take on the DC Comics source material that nonetheless found time for camp ridiculousness in a ‘70s-style setting. And a cast that ranged from icons like Jada Pinkett Smith, TV stalwarts like Donal Logue and Ben McKenzie, to relative newcomers like Robin Lord Taylor, David Mazouz, and Camren Bicondova.
Yet the Warner Bros. series co-created by Bruno Heller and Danny Cannon turns 10 years old on September 22. And over the course of five seasons on Fox, and 100 episodes, Gotham reinvented the way we look at the entirety of the Batman mythos. It also launched a legion of fans of its own, devoted to the close-knit cast, the wild swings at mythology, and relationships ranging from the classic Bat and the Cat, to the delightful Riddler and Penguin pairing.
With the premiere of the series a decade in past, and the finale five years in the wind, IGN talked to the cast, creators, and crew of Gotham to rediscover the first year (and change) of the boy who would become Batman.
Bruno Heller was an old hand at television by the time he created Gotham.
He had co-created Rome for HBO and the BBC, and created the long-running The Mentalist for Warner Bros, which ran on CBS. However, his next show, the legal drama The Advocates, shot a pilot in 2012, but was not picked up to series. With his schedule open, it was time to figure out what was next.
Bruno Heller (Developer, EP, writer, showrunner):
Making shows like a superhero show is tough to do on TV, because magic and spectacle… That's movie stuff. The joy of the Batman universe, for a start, is that Batman has no superpowers, which grounds him in a reality that is much easier to create for a TV show, as opposed to a big movie. It's not about special effects. It's about what's going on in Batman's head.
As opposed to, say, Superman, Batman is much more suited to TV. So I was thinking the world of Gotham. Also, New York. You've got an instant set. It's a set based show, as most TV shows have to be. Those were the elements that started to make sense to me. And then, what's a new recipe with those elements that hadn't been done, at least it hadn't been seen on TV? And who's a character in the DC universe who is a real person, not a garish, colorful figure, but someone that you follow every week?
However, it wasn’t Heller who figured out the final piece; it was his, at the time, 12-year-old son.
Bruno Heller: It was Felix, my boy, Felix, who was much more of a comic fan than I was. So all of these discussions I was having with him about the DC Universe and who would be the guy… That's [James] Gordon. And from that, young detective investigating the Wayne murders was a natural concatenation of ideas. As soon as that notion hit, that he was the cop that investigates the death of the Waynes… The whole series is right there, really, because it's Batman as a boy, the origin stories of all those characters like the Joker and the Riddler and the Penguin, but as young people.
[From] coming on that notion and pitching it to [CEO of Warner Bros. Television Studios] Peter Roth was two days, because that's all it. I mean, and I don't take credit for it. It's Bob Finger, and everybody else who's been part of the DC Universe created that idea. It would be foolish to say I came up with that notion, it's like a wonderful traditional song that I got to do an arrangement for.
On September 24, 2013, it was announced that Gotham was getting a straight to series order from Fox after a bidding war… The same day ABC premiered Marvel series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Begun, the network superhero wars had. But despite the later start, by the time Fox ordered the show, Heller had the broad strokes figured out – specifically two big arcs for Season 1.
Bruno Heller: I [was glad] they gave a series order because I'd broken the season beforehand.
Danny Cannon (Director, EP): The pitch was all about Jim Gordon sitting down with a kid who just lost his parents, and making a promise to him. And [Heller] basically said, the first season is Jim Gordon trying to keep that promise. But the other thing that he really had down was the Penguin saga.
Bruno Heller: The key to it was the Penguin story and [his boss] Fish Mooney… Batman and Gordon, you can't have too much story there, because that’s the future.
Danny Cannon: You had one kid's journey losing his parents, and you had this other kid who had nothing. One was going to build his life up with his butler and with Jim Gordon, and look into his parents’ death and become inquisitive, and become a man, or attempt to become a man in a righteous way. And this other one, the only way he could become a man and become the person he wanted to be was by treading on the skulls of the dead, and making it happen for himself in a nefarious way. So Bruno had that down. He had the Penguin part down, which I thought was really good.
Bruno Heller: Penguin as a young man, he's got to be working for somebody else. It's better if he's an underdog. It's more interesting. It's more sympathy for the character. The key to the young villains is that if they're just villainous, then they don't have legs… As soon as you see someone's childhood or youth, you understand who they are, and you have sympathy for them. So it was telling him as a young person, so he has to have a boss. What would be an interesting boss? Beryl Reid was my first visualization for Fish Mooney. Great comic, dramatic actress of the ‘60s that my dad did a movie with, actually. [Editor’s Note: 1968’s The Killing of Sister George]
Despite the strong show of support from Fox, time was running short to turn around a pilot. Upfronts, when the networks parade their hot new shows in front of advertisers and reveal their fall schedules, take place in May. So director Danny Cannon was brought in to help Heller flesh out his take on Gotham City. Cannon was another TV veteran, having directed the pilots for multiple iterations of the CSI franchise, as well as serving as an EP on those shows.
Danny Cannon: It was Thanksgiving, and I met Bruno [on] Thanksgiving Day, I think in the morning, because it was kind of urgent at that point… I knew the comic book world more than Bruno did, which was a good thing, because Bruno came at it from a real character point of view, as if [the characters] could be anyone.
Bruno Heller: It was very clear from very early on that [Gotham] was a director's show. It needed to have an immense amount of glamor and gloss and a strong, powerful visual style that could be sustained… Lots of people can do that in a big movie. But Danny is someone who had proven many times before to be able to create a powerful visual style, and deliver it for TV, which is really difficult to deliver whilst telling an intelligent story with characters and actual drama… [Danny was] part of the package that was being offered to Fox, whether or not firmly under contract to do it. But that was part of the deal, because they would need to know that we weren't going to do it kitchen sink style or on the cheap.
One of the lovely things about working with Danny was… The synergy was already there… We sat [in a restaurant] for a couple of hours just talking about Batman and DC. His vision of it, and his memories of it, and what we thought of the thing. And he was very much a comic book guy and a visual guy. And I'm not at all, really. A great deal of what I was doing was creating a framework for someone who had a concept, and had a rich dream world of Gotham.
Danny Cannon: I instantly started riffing and started painting the world for him, and he said, “This is what I needed… I just want to write the characters.” And I said, “Well, if you let me, I could hire a production designer now, and we could just draw.” Which is what me and [Production Designer] Doug Kraner did for three weeks while Bruno wrote the script.
So me and me and Doug went off and we drew… Tim Burton had done his world, and Nolan had done his. And I always thought somewhere in the middle was Gotham. I just had it in my head that Gotham was like [Mayor] Ed Koch, 1979 New York, where the trains were painted, where there was no gentrification, it was out control crime. The world grew from that idea of when I first visited New York, and it was a scary, but vital place, where so much was happening on the street and anything could happen.
We were drawing the GCPD interior, and I pulled pictures for Doug from St. Pancras Station in London; Victorian, Gothic stuff. I was saying that Gotham is like New York was built at the turn of the century into the ‘30s, and then it was just left [that way]. It was darkened with soot, and it was spray painted. It was tagged, and it had no steel or glass buildings in it. In other words, they built a city. Everyone moved into that city. And it's just been left to rot, and that's where the crime comes from… The dark alleyways and the stairwells.
I pulled a lot of pictures. I drew cityscapes. And Doug said to me, “everything you're drawing has got stormy skies.” And I was like, “That's it. The sun should never be shining in Gotham.” I think Bruno said at one point, “It's a poem to everything we think New York is.” The excitement of it. The danger of it and the unpredictability of it. So I was doing all these stormy skies and cityscapes, and Doug was starting to make GCPD like a gothic train station. I started pulling pictures for Bruno, 1970s, early 1980s police uniforms, police cars, guns… I designed the wall in my office, which was just the look and feel of Gotham. And [Heller] just walked in and nodded. He just went with that. There was no notes. It was just: that's it. And he went off and wrote again… That informed Bruno as he wrote some really good characters.
Bruno Heller: The first iterations of the pilot were much more of a slow roll. Gordon was the central character and Bruce was a secondary character, for practical TV reasons that by definition, he's a young kid, and the younger the kid, the more pathos there is in that. But you want him just old enough to be a great actor and no older than that. And then you've got a seven year run, watching this kid grow up… There was very little of any of the other characters. The Penguin shows up.
But the demands of TV and the demands of marketing hit that hard. So we introduced all the other characters: [Selina Kyle], The Riddler, and that made the story that much more complicated, that all of those characters had to be introduced as soon as possible in the run. So much of it is, you have to introduce Gordon, and he had to introduce his partner and everybody else. It's like throwing a dinner party when you've got to introduce everyone to everyone else.
One additional piece of Gotham was already unofficially in place: Ben McKenzie as James Gordon, who had previously starred in Heller’s pilot for The Advocates.
McKenzie wasn’t publicly announced as joining the cast until February 8, 2014. But Heller had him in mind from the very beginning.
Bruno Heller: He was such a natural Gordon… His stock in trade as an actor is a kind of integrity and intensity. If he wasn't an actor, he'd be a cop, and as you see in his later career, he has become a crime buster. A Bitcoin Avenger.
Ben McKenzie (James Gordon): I got a call from Bruno in, it must have been early 2014 saying, “hey, Ben, it’s Bruno, I have written a script and a part for you of Jim Gordon. I wrote the part with you in mind. Would you please take a look at it?” He and I had done a pilot the previous year together for Warner Brothers, produced for CBS, that didn't go, so we knew each other and liked each other… It's the only part that had ever been written for me, then or since. Nice call to get, and of course I had to to very calmly respond like, “Yes, I'll definitely take a look at it.” While inside, I was jumping for joy.
Bruno Heller: I can't think of any other names that were ever mentioned in that role.
Ben McKenzie: My primary concern was, what is the depth of the show? I'm a huge Batman fan, and particularly the iterations that began with Frank Miller, had continued on into various darker, more character driven, fully realized, three dimensional worlds, full of real people with real problems who happen to live in this elevated alternate reality. And so when Danny showed me his boards that he'd been working on, it was a huge relief, because he was able to put into images what I was imagining.
Danny Cannon: Ben McKenzie came and looked at the wall and went, “yep, yes.”
Ben McKenzie: This world might look dark, scary, but also full of bright colors at times, a noir-ish sort of New York, anywhere from the 1950s all the way through, say, the ‘80s or ‘90s, trapped in time where danger lurks around every corner. And the boards that he put together were just beautiful. As we got closer, and I was able to observe the building of these absolutely beautiful sets, that just further gave me confidence in what we were doing. But my main creative question was, what was the world going to look like?
And then, personally, as an actor and someone who was hoping to grow my career, I just played a cop on Southland, a rookie cop. And I understood that the premise of Gotham needed to revolve around a young Jim Gordon meeting a young Bruce Wayne after his parents murder. But I didn't want to play the same beats that I played on Southland of this bright-eyed, bushy-tailed kid who just can't imagine a world that's grim and gross. It felt a little too cute and also a little repetitive for me, personally. So I wanted to play him as a rookie, but a guy who comes from the military, who's seen some pretty horrible stuff in his service. So when he comes into Gotham, he may be a little bit wet behind the ears, but he adjusts very quickly, and he's quite smart and quite adept and adroit at dealing with the villains in their encounters. Bruno and I found a compromise position there that I think worked for for all parties.
Donal Logue also joined early in the process, meeting with Heller on December 6, 2013 about the role of corrupt detective Harvey Bullock. Unlike other castings, the veteran actor’s participation in the project leaked… But not as Bullock, as Gordon, with Logue quickly shutting the rumor down on Twitter.
Donal Logue (Harvey Bullock): I had a call to meet Bruno Heller at Warner Brothers about a new project they were doing concerning Gotham, and I didn't know much about it. I went in, and I met with Bruno, and he told me that they wanted to do a detective drama set in the Gotham City Police Department. It sounded fantastic. What he wanted to cast was Bullock.
I have this weird suspicion or feeling that someone saw me in there talking to Bruno… It's Los Angeles, someone just said, “Oh, we saw these two guys together,” and so the rumor [of Logue as Gordon] started… I don't know if it's a hotline or they fed it to some gossip person, and then it went nuts.
But the reality was, at the time, they were starting to put together a thing with Ben, and then everyone else was going through the traditional casting process for Gotham, but I kind of avoided that. I got lucky. And then I got a phone call about Law and Order just after it. And then during the Gotham pilot, I was doing two episodes of Law and Order at the same time. So it was a wild, wild time. Hard, but amazing.
Logue recalls that early in the process, he and McKenzie met for the first time while doing a network presentation for the series.
Donal Logue: When we had locked in and when Fox finally announced that they were doing it… I've been involved in things, but I've never been involved in anything like Gotham that had so much pregame hype. You could feel the weight of the publicity machine behind it. We had this thing at Fox that was an announcement thing. It was just Ben and me. The moment that we met, we were immediately ushered to these stools to sit and do this interview as partners in this new creative venture.
And over the course of this interview, while cameras were rolling, we fell in so quickly and so perfectly and so easily, and this was it confirmed the suspicion I had about Ben, that he was a great guy, that he's incredibly smart, he's well spoken. People there thought that we had been buddies and cohorts for a long time [but] we had to meet essentially on camera, doing a publicity thing.
For most of the cast, though, it was a rapid audition process held late in 2013 and in the early months on 2014. The sets were being built, the pilot was getting finalized… All that was needed was the company of actors.
Danny Cannon: When we auditioned for the show, we didn't call it Gotham. It was “Warner Brothers Project,” or something. And Bruno wrote these brilliant two page monologues… It was very clever by Bruno to write the character but not announce that. The monologues were so fucking good, I'm sad they never made it into the show… Listening to actors say those words he'd written, the characters, you could see instantly that they knew the character.
Bruno Heller: The trouble with most sides is that they're dialogues, because most drama is dialogue, and so one side of it is someone reading it off. And you very rarely get Shakespearean speeches. Batman might have a good one, and Gordon might. But for most of the characters, there's not enough in the script to really let them rip on the character. So I would write little monologues, like half a page that just delivered the character in spades.
Sean Pertwee (Alfred Pennyworth): People didn't know what it was. It wasn't called Gotham. It was just this piece. It was a generic speech, but it really impressed me. No disrespect to my American cousins, but when Americans write for Londoners or people from England, sometimes it's slightly jars. I'm sure the same is applicable if the English were writing for specific areas of New York or something like that. But there is something about the sort of the language and the syntax that really spoke to me. There was this page-long speech about a guy going into a pub and getting into an altercation with this guy and threatening to break his larynx, punch him in the throat.
Bruno Heller: The Penguin’s was a good one, just him walking in and being sort of harmless, and then slowly revealing menace and evil, but starting from a very placid, passive spot, so that you can see the actors go through the gears, and you can give them very specific notes to bring it up or down. In a normal page of dialogue it's tough to do. The thing with a show like this is the actors have to be able to do big, broad Commedia Dell'arte stuff, melodrama, and that's not Marlon Brando mumbling or method acting; that's very theatrical. Or it's a combination of the two. Some characters, like Gordon is not meant to be a theatrical character, but The Penguin or Fish Mooney or The Riddler have to be bigger than life. So that's where those pages came from. I wish I had copies of them. I don't tend to keep souvenirs, but I guess they're out there somewhere.
Robin Lord Taylor (The Penguin/Oswald Cobblepot): The character was named Paul, and they wrote [a] fake scene. At that point, I started getting a little bit of traction. I had been on a couple of episodes of Law and Order, had just done an episode of Walking Dead, which was a big moment for me. So I was feeling this good energy and momentum in my career at that time. I got the scene for Paul, worked on it, not knowing anything about what it was. Paul was some sort of mafioso type who was pulling a con over on another mafioso Don. And in the end, it's revealed that Paul had kidnapped the Don's daughter, with a whole classic Penguin reveal, it turns out he had the upper hand the entire time.
I went in and taped with Meg Simon, who was the casting director of Warner Bros. at the time in New York, and we did one take. And she was like, “That was perfect. I don't want to touch that, okay?” It was a couple days later when I found out that they were calling me back [and] they were bringing me out to Los Angeles to test. That's when I found out what the project was and that I had been auditioning for Penguin. So that was pretty exciting, and terrifying. But also, in a way, I was so grateful that it went down that way because any sort of anxiety or nervousness about it, having such an iconic character, wasn't there for that first round, because I didn't know.
Danny Cannon: We flew Rob into LA with Kieran Culkin as well, reading it… I didn't make him do it live. I did it on tape, and I showed Warner Brothers and Fox the actors and and that's how they were selected. You know, Kieran was brilliant, too, by the way.
Bruno Heller: They were both brilliant in very similar ways, they just got it instantly, and were instantly scary and made you back up in the room with how well they could hit it.
Danny Cannon: I think I can say that now there's so much water under the bridge, and Kieran is such a celebrity. Scott Pilgrim for me, I was like, guy is fucking amazing, right? So I was just so glad he showed up but his comedy is so specific. His genius, Kieran is is so identifiable. Robin was just an open book with not much experience.
Robin Lord Taylor: I don't want to correct Danny, but it was actually Rory Culkin. Kieran may have read on a different day, I don't know, but I know that I was in the waiting room with Rory, who's a brilliant, brilliant actor. I admire the Culkin brothers, all of them. I've lost [roles] to Kieran and Rory over the years. And so I remember when I walked in and I saw Rory sitting there, I was like, “Oh fuck.”
Bruno Heller: I would always rather give the complete unknown guy a crack. When I have that choice, I'll take that choice for practical reasons. Acting is a lot like boxing. Hunger is great… Especially with a character like The Penguin, someone who can taste it… Who needs that? Who wants it? And Robin was that. Apart from the fact that [he] was very facile, brilliant, then would do something fucking terrifying and then just be a lovely, lovely guy the next second.
Danny Cannon: Robin found the pain. What Robin had inside of him, he's a very sympathetic guy. He's a very empathetic guy, and he really found the pain in this character. That's what Bruno and I were looking for, was, it's not like I'm a dastardly, two dimensional villain. He's this very four dimensional, complex, emotional character, and that's what makes him a great villain, because you empathize with him, but also you're scared of him because he knows how to push your buttons.
Robin Lord Taylor: We all have five or six moments in our lives that we remember every single detail about it, and [getting cast on Gotham] was one of them. For me, it was the moment that my life changed. I was in Los Angeles for two weeks, and I had my test at the beginning of the two week period. So I was just cooling my heels… In this random hotel that's not near anything. I was going out in LA seeing friends and trying to not go insane, just waiting that whole week. I guess they kept me there in case they wanted me to do any chemistry reads or read again or whatever. But they didn't. They didn't call me in again.
I spent two weeks, and then that final night, the night before I was flying back to New York, I hadn't heard anything, and I was making peace as best as I could. I ordered a giant meal from room service. In the time between the [ordering the food] and before the food arrived, I got a call from my agent that I got the job. You can imagine [I’m] freaking out on the phone with my agent. At that moment, the food arrives. This woman holding a tray, and I opened the door with tears just streaming down my face… In the middle of my tears, I had to tell her, I was like, “I just got my first TV show.” I was very emotional, laughing and crying at the same time. And she's like, “Oh my gosh, that's amazing. Congratulations. Here's the bill.” And then I’m sitting there trying to figure out gratuity, but it's really hard to do when two minutes before you got the best news of your entire career.
Sean Pertwee was in New York at the time filming the role of Lestrade on Elementary when he got the call to audition.
Sean Pertwee: I went into the audition meeting, and it was a breeze, but I didn't know what it was for. I knew it was for some new series that people were really excited about. The next day, I got a phone call saying they want to see me down in Los Angeles, which is very exciting, because that never sort of happened to me… I was down at the studio when I saw the long, lanky figure of Bruno Heller lope past with Danny Cannon. I knew Danny, because I'd done this film called Goal with him… Anyway, they walked past and I said, “Guys, what are you doing? What you're doing here?” And [Danny] said, “seeing you, [you] fucking idiot.” And I was like, “What do you mean? What is this?” And he said, “You don't know? So this is called Gotham.” I went, “okay” and, and they said, “Well, you’re Alfred Pennyworth, this is the role that you're reading for.”
I'd never read anything like this in my life. It was about an East Ender going into a pub breaking someone's larynx, and I was like, Oh my God… I was prepared to shoot myself in the foot, because you want to do what you think they want you to do. And what was extraordinary about their auditioning process… We all as actors are very self aware. Obviously, that's our kind of our job, in a way. And what Danny and Bruno had done was that they wanted to see elements of us that we weren't aware [of].
And that's why they weren't titled, why we weren't given names. If I'd known it was going to be in for Alfred Pennyworth, I swear to god, I would have completely blown it. I would have done some kind of version [of] Michael Caine, or being influenced by Michael Gough, something that probably [had] been done before. But instead, what they wanted to see was a glimmer of yourself. And boy, did they fucking sort that one right out. Because it's one of the best cast pieces I've certainly ever been involved in.
I can't tell you how nervous I was because I had to wait [in] LA to go back because we [had] to sign contracts. It's a terrifying thing, being an English actor filming in New York, then going down to Los Angeles, having to be back on set first thing in the morning and waiting to literally the 11th hour, I thought I was going to die with nerves, hearing whether I got to [do] something that would change my life and my sons and my wife's. And they said, “What were you worried about? You got the job straight the minute you walked out the room.”
On February 11, 2014, four more were announced as joining the cast of the show: Robin Lord Taylor as Oswald Cobblepott aka The Penguin, Zabryna Guevara as Captain Essen, Sean Pertwee as Alfred Pennyworth, and Erin Richards as Barbara Kean. Donal Logue was officially announced as Gordon’s partner on February 12, 2014.
Ben McKenzie: [The show] was cast absolutely beautifully by [Bialy/Thomas & Associates].
Sean Pertwee: They were incredibly brave by casting people that had not necessarily done a great deal… Robin Lord Taylor and Cory Michael Smith, and you've got experienced people like Donal Logue and Jada [Pinkett Smith] and Ben, but you've got these young actors, David Mazouz. I mean, just extraordinary actors and as a collective, and that's all down to Danny and to Bruno and their casting process. I have to say it was one of the most important casting processes I've ever been involved with.
Next up was the younger cast, starting with Selina Kyle, the girl who would become Catwoman.
Camren Bicondova (Selina Kyle): Oh my gosh, I swear it felt like a three month process, but it could have been a two week process. I was a freshman in high school, and I received an email from my manager at the time for this audition with the breakdown of this character, Lucy, who was between the ages of 14 and 16. I remember vividly that the character was described as “an orphan, street thief, fierce one, cornered, actress must be good at cat movements.” I was so oblivious. I remember one of my parents was like, I think this is Catwoman. And I was like, no, there's no way. But thankfully, I was oblivious, because I think if I knew, I would have gotten really nervous.
So I went into the audition. It was on the Warner Brothers lot and one of these little shacks that they have over there, and I remember it was the first audition that I genuinely felt 100% confident in. And this was after, internally, I don't think I've ever said this, but I had been auditioning for at least two years consecutively at that point and hadn't gotten anything. I made the decision, and I didn't even tell my parents, I was like, “You know what, if I don't get anything within three months, I'm just gonna quit, and I'm gonna tell my parents, let's just move back to San Diego, I can't do this anymore.” And then within those three months, I get this audition.
I did the audition, the first time I wore a really big bomber jacket. They liked what I did, so I got a call back, and the callback was like a week later, but they asked that I come in form-fitted clothes. So for the callback, I wore a tight unitard. And I thought that was weird, because I was like, “Why do I need to show, like, my body type?” But I was a dancer. I'm used to that. I'm used to casting directors wanting to see what we look like.
So after the callback… I remember at least two weeks of me going to school, not hearing anything, feeling like, “what the heck? I thought I killed that audition. Why am I not hearing anything?” And then I got the notification that I would do a test. That was my first test ever, and I was super excited. I had a week to prepare, and at that point they said, if you can prepare a set of cat movements, that would be great, but it's not mandatory. And I was like, “oh, it's mandatory if I'm trying to get this job, honey.” So for the week leading up to the test, I would annoy my cat. His name was Mr. G, and whenever he was sleeping, I would wake him up to see how he would jump. I would trail him to see how annoyed he would get and how his walk would change when I would be right behind him, I would see the kind of moves that he did when I would play with him. I watched videos of Cats, the musical. I watched videos of cats fighting. And I choreographed this very short piece of choreography based on the story of, “Okay, what would I do if I were a cat chasing a bird, hunting?” I still have that video. It's so funny, my 14 year old self just jumping off of HVAC. But yeah, I choreographed this piece, and I went to my friend's rooftop that she had at the time and recorded it just in case they wanted a DVD.
But in the test itself, I did the scene, which was the exact same scene that I had done two auditions prior. I remember Danny asked, “Do you have a set of cat movements that you can perform?” And I was like, “Yeah.” I was trying to figure out, part of the choreography was jumping off of this HVAC unit. And obviously that's not in a screening theater [at] Warner Brothers. And so I was like, um, you know, what can I use, that chair? Can I actually jump off this chair? And so I jumped off the chair and did the whole piece, and they seemed to like it.
Bruno Heller: There's lots of young, feline women who can dance and jump about who want to be in TV. I didn't watch all of them, but the casting directors had to watch thousands. And [Camren] was so good and so funny and alive… She was fearless and kind of nervy, and a brilliant dancer and gymnast. And it needed that. You can't fake that stuff, It had to be someone who could do really intense physical gymnastic stuff.
Camren Bicondova: I did the test, and then a bunch of time went by… We go into my manager's office, and she says, “Oh, someone has some news to share with you.” And to this day, in that moment, I didn't know who was calling me. I think it was my agent at the time, but I don't know who exactly shared the news. Very embarrassing, but the person who called, they said, “meow, you got the job.” I think they said “you’re Catwoman,” but the first thing that they said was, “meow.” And I was like, “what? I don't understand.”
And then it started to hit me once the process had already started, the fittings and the photographs and paparazzi on set… I would actually get annoyed with people who would say, “how does it feel to play Catwoman?” Because she's not Catwoman yet, she's Selina. It didn't hit me for a long time, actually.
The key role, though, that the whole pilot – and series – revolved around, was young Batman, aka Bruce Wayne. And if they didn’t get that right, the whole thing fell apart.
Bruno Heller: My first thought about Batman is that this is a very dysfunctional crazy person with with all kind of roiling neuroses and paranoias and fears… So how do you find that and still have a kid who is… He's an Apollonian character. He's someone who learns. His parents die, and instead of becoming a crackhead, sits there and thinks, I'm going to become the bane of criminals, I'm going to turn myself into a weapon, but an intelligent weapon, a detective and so intense and brilliant and mad. Go find a 13 year old kid that can deliver that as an actor. There's [not a lot] of kids working five days a week on a set In that intense environment. It needs to be a very level, placid, serene personality, with a strong family background to help him, with a great deal of discipline that's on top of the actual acting talent. And that was David.
David Mazouz (Bruce Wayne): I did my first audition, I want to say on the Warner Brothers lot. It was 2013 and it was right before the holiday. So it was early December 2013, and [I] didn't hear anything for a couple weeks because it was the holidays. And then early January, they told me I had gotten a call back. [There were] still a lot of people in the mix, and they were testing me against three other boys. It was all the same scene.
Sean Pertwee: David was more aware that he was reading for Master B, but I certainly wasn't.
David Mazouz: I knew that I was auditioning for Bruce Wayne. I don't know why I had that information… My scene wasn't very Bruce Wayne in that it was me with a therapist, somebody who was asking me questions about my life, and my brother had just died, and it seemed like I was in therapy for that… It was only a page, a page and a half. The scene wasn't that long. The therapist asks me what the last good memory I had [was] of me and my brother together, and I go on this story about how I was camping with the family, and me and my brother always loved to run away from our parents and climb a tree, and we climbed a tree, and an eagle landed on the tree, and I saw how it lit up my brother's face, something like that. That was the gist of the scene, and obviously very well written. It was written by Bruno, and it was that same scene every time.
Danny Cannon: There was a show that [David Mazouz] was in that was not going to continue [Editor’s Note: Touch, which ran for two seasons from 2012-2013.]. And we called the people on that show, and they were like, “you have to sign him. He's amazing.” We watched the the clips from that, and then met him. And you know what? They were right.
David Mazouz: I was testing against three other boys, and then it became me and another boy from that group of four, and then they got rid of him, but then they wanted me to test against three other people, and this is all in the course of a week. Every time I would finish an audition, a couple hours later, I’d get a call from my agent. “They liked you.” “They want to see you again on Monday.” ‘They want to see you again tomorrow.” So I tested, again, three other boys. They narrowed it down, then again to me and another boy, and then got rid of that boy, again. So it was the same process twice, and then they told me that I got the role. For one of the initial auditions I had an 102 degree fever, and it must have made me better, because I got the call back.
Danny Cannon: We were lucky that he'd already cut his teeth on another show. So we weren't introducing him to this world of television. He'd done it, and he'd done it in such a mature fashion.
David Mazouz: It was pretty strenuous. There was a two week period where I auditioned maybe six times, every other day. And for one of the final auditions, I had relatively long hair then that was curly, and they told me to go to Bloomingdale's. Told me exactly what clothes to buy. It was like a Brooks Brothers, light blue, button-down shirt. And they had The Mentalist, which was Bruno's other show at the time, hair and makeup team give me a haircut and style my hair and put gel in it so that it was straight and it was parted and it looked like Bruce Wayne ended up looking like on the show, so that they could see what I would really look like in the role. Which was the first and only time I've ever experienced hair and makeup for an audition provided by the company.
Bruno Heller: I have no idea how many people we looked at. You know, I'm not sure that it was a huge number, because there's not that many great young kid actors who could play Batman. So it's not like there were thousands of people, but there was a lot and [David] was top of the list pretty early on. Oftentimes, there's two or three choices. As I recall, I don't think we had a good number two.
David Mazouz: I had gotten the part in or around early February. And I remember I got the news before my Bar Mitzvah. It was a tradition for me and my friends in our friend group to make little dances, choreographed dances for each other. My friends did one at my Bar Mitzvah for me, and they all wore Batman paraphernalia. And it was the first time that it really hit me like, “oh, wow, I'm actually gonna be doing this.”
While casting was one important aspect of the show,
without getting too cliché, there was another character that was vitally important: New York City, which would stand in for Gotham City in the series.
Danny Cannon: Warner Brothers, when they first talked to me, started talking about Toronto. And I was like, we're going to New York. I'll find some stage space. It's funny that Warner Brothers were very adamant about, “[we] can't afford New York” And I was like: but you're not spending the money, I am. Don't tell me how many days I need. I know many days on stage I need, and I know how to move the stages around. I'd had a lot of experience making tiny budgets work on other shows, and it's all about once you've created that world, then you have the language.
Ben McKenzie: We had a series of conversations, Bruno and I initially, and then I met Danny Cannon, who I didn't know at the time, and we discussed what the show would look and feel like, where we would shoot it, because there was a conversation about shooting in LA initially on the back lot. But we all agreed that Gotham [should] be shot in New York.
Danny Cannon: Todd Phillips, when he was doing Joker, he did it on the same stages where we were doing Gotham, we were wrapping up Gotham, and they took the new stages that they'd just built on the Navy Yard, and they got all our cars, they got police uniforms, and it was kind of like, “yeah, that's it.” We had the same idea. I’ve never spoken to Todd, but you could just see it. That was the look. The look was, Al Pacino could walk out as Serpico in that, or Gene Hackman could walk out as Doyle in the French Connection. It would all make sense. That's the world. That's the New York we grew up looking at going, we have to go to New York. It's the most dangerous place in the world. It's fucking awesome. It's right before Hip Hop changed New York. That is where punk was still happening. This is why, when you listen to all the music selects I did on on Gotham, they're all late ‘70s, early 1980s.
Sean Pertwee: Every British actor, European actor, any actor from across the world, would be absolutely bare-face lying if they didn't say they wanted to film on the streets of Manhattan. I felt like I was in a Scorsese movie we were shooting in, all over Manhattan. We're shooting on Staten Island. We’re shooting in Chinatown. We were shooting in the Lower East Side, where I was living.
Danny Cannon: There was one episode of Gotham… I'll never point out to anyone where a location was picked that I didn't pick… Sometimes you're writing, or sometimes you're directing, or sometimes you're in the edit room and you miss something, and a location was picked… I watched the scene, and I literally said to the producer, “can we reshoot?” He went, “No, it's too expensive.” Some people didn’t understand the world. It doesn't matter how hard you hit the image of it. Sometimes people just say, “Oh, it's set in an office. So we can shoot this office, right?” Like, no, it's very specific. And I find that about superhero things. Chris Nolan was a genius when he did the three Batmans, and he knew he could use any city in the world, because the script was so specific. Tim Burton, the script was so specific that they knew how to build the world from that. And it's a movie, so you have a whole year to prep it. But in TV, you have to go so fast. And so I was the one constantly protecting the integrity of that, of that world and and of the pilot. You're constantly reminding people of how you got there. Otherwise you end up shooting a comic book film on the streets with regular cops, and it’s just people. People look ridiculous.
Bruno Heller: I can't remember what season it was, we were shooting on a rooftop in Brooklyn, it was a fight between Penguin, Batman and, christ, I don't know who else. I mean, we had many fights between those guys on a roof. It's a nighttime shoot on a rooftop in Brooklyn, and the landlord was an Orthodox Jewish guy, and he brought his kids up on the roof to watch these crazy film/TV people working. And I’ve not got much to do except watch and occasionally make small adjustments to the things. So I was talking with these guys… They had no idea who these characters were, or what we were doing. The kids said, “Who's Batman?” So I had to explain Batman to these kids, and I happen to remember that – maybe it's about Superman – but the cape was from a Rabbi's cape, as I recall. I don't know whether that's actually true or that's an apocryphal story of how they came up with it, but the kids were transfixed, because they were watching all this stuff. And the old guy was just like, “feh.” [Laughs] I have very fond memories of that night on that roof and those little kids just seeing Batman for the first time and realizing… They were being told this story for the first time.
Sean Pertwee: I'll tell you a very quick, quick anecdote. The brilliant Cameron Monaghan, who played the proto-Joker, and I and Theresa [Marra-Siliceo] from hair, we were crossing the Bowery, and we're shooting… This magic act scene that Cameron did. I'm bashed to bits and bobs. I've got black eyes. [I’m] carrying a piece, or I've got holsters on me. I'm covered in blood. We have two severed heads being taken to set to show the director for a later scene… And Cam's got a slit throat from here to here, with that mad, crazy makeup. We're standing at the traffic lights on Bowery, tourists, and also New Yorkers, [who] are standing next to us. And you know what their reaction was? Absolutely nothing. They didn't even look at us. We're standing with heads and slit throats, and they just [don’t react]. That was it. Anywhere else in the world, people would have been screaming or whatever. No, not in Manhattan. That's just so New York.
Danny Cannon: In order to stay in New York, I needed to book those stages. That needed to happen. I signed the thing myself, and I got in a lot of trouble with business affairs on that one. We need to be in New York, and we're on the Navy Yard right in Brooklyn… Having those stages, being in that city informed the show, and I've never gone over budget in my life. I did have that reputation with Warner Brothers. Years later, I would do another pilot for them, and I looked at this ridiculously huge budget and said, “Why do we need all of this for this?” I gave them three and a half million dollars back on that one… Even though I got in trouble for for going so fast and knowing what I needed, nobody tapped me on the shoulder later on and made me apologize. I did the right thing for the show. I did the right thing for Warner Brothers. I did the right thing for the budget. And I'm very proud of all of that. Sometimes you just have to commit.
Filming in New York also meant most of the cast needed to relocate. And while confidence was high in Gotham, there was still the risk of moving across country – or the ocean – for a pilot.
Sean Pertwee: I had no experience in any of these big shows, and the possibility that things can go wrong… You can sign for seven years, which, that's the standard sort of contract thing with the studios. You could be picked up by a pilot, and then it could be dumped, and you can be out of pocket, because you can be stuck out there. You would have to find your own accommodation, and it's a huge thing. But having said that, all of our company, the majority of our company, had moved up from Los Angeles to Manhattan. Manhattan, it's the same equal distance to London. So we were all in the same boat.
David Mazouz: I was 12, and I can't overstate that enough. I was just going to school. I had my friends. I was on another TV show before, called Touch, which was also on Fox for two years, and that was just a year before. I was doing movies that year, and I'd been working, but there was never an audition that I had gotten that made me nervous, because the stakes were so low for me. I was just a normal kid, you know. And if I didn't get something, I would just go back to school and hang out with my friends and I'd forget about it. It was a fun thing that was a cherry on top of everything I was already doing. Gotham would change all that, because for the first time, it forced me to move across the country for five years and say goodbye, at least temporarily, to that life.
With the cast assembled, and production mere days away,
it was time to present them to a host of network and production executives, via a table read of the pilot.
Bruno Heller: The first time the cast was properly together was for the table read. Table reads are always very stressful because it's the first table read with the cast in front of the network and the studio. That's where someone will come in and say, “don't really like that guy doing that thing, can you sack him, please, and get someone else in?” And that's where that happens. So it's very high stress, and always a very artificial situation. … You can [usually] get a very good idea of how the show is going to play from the table read, because it's laugh lines, or dramatic lines. But [Gotham] is… Whatever the hell it is. It's melodrama. It's very hard to get a real sense of of what the show is going to be from table read. So it's stressful that way.
Ben McKenzie: That was quite, quite intense. The first table read, it's the only table read where the executives actually appear. So we had Warner Brothers executives as well as Fox executives, either in person or appearing virtually. It's terrifying.
David Mazouz: I remember a very fancy corporate boardroom with a very long table and a bunch of – it felt like to me at the time hundreds, and I know it wasn't – but felt like hundreds of faces [who] looked very professional and were watching me… Everyone was nervous.
Ben McKenzie: Every table read I do, I'm always convinced that I'm going to be fired, or there's going to be a talking to or something, because I get so nervous.
Bruno Heller: I was mainly gearing up for the politics afterwards because, when they do say, “get rid of that person.” I always say, “No.” And then fight it out. But in this case, there was none of that.
Robin Lord Taylor:I’d never done a table read before. It was always show up on the day and hit your mark and do your thing and then wrap and go home… And so I remember having this opportunity to read the entire script with everybody, it helped me feel comfortable in that I was part of a company of actors creating something. It's really hard to have that feeling on set, because not everybody's there. You don't get the whole sense of the arc of the episode… And I just remember walking out of that feeling like we were a community. We were a team. We were going to do something amazing.
Ben McKenzie: There was also an energy in the room, a sense of purpose and a sense of, we don't want to mess this up. These are big shoes to fill. These are iconic characters. It's a massively popular world, the world of Batman and his villains. It's a big honor to be able to to be a part of it to begin with. So I think we all felt that pressure.
Donal Logue: Meg [Simon] had discovered me in Boston when I was 22 years old. And we had this super long, human history. She was a critical cog in my transition from being a theater actor, really just finding me in a crowd and putting me in my first project, which was called Common Ground with Mike Newell. So I got to see Meg. And when I think of the table read, I think of that moment of getting to reconnect with this person who is so critical in my development. I was approaching my late 40s at that time, and so I was looking back 26 years to when I had started as a theater actor.
Bruno Heller: One of the things about the pilot was it did a fairly good job of introducing a lot of people without them stepping on each other's toes, and not putting them all in the same room. If you'd had to have them all in the same scene, like a Comic-Con, that would be tough. There was room for each individual actor to come on and do their thing without looking sideways at, what's she doing, or what's he doing, or am I too big, or am I too small? Danny was very good at modulating everyone's performance. So the big people who were meant to be big were big, and the people who meant to keep it small, or modest, were kept that way.
Soon after the table read,
production on the Gotham pilot episode began on March 17, 2014, in New York City. It would last for about three weeks.
Danny Cannon: Nobody could do Gotham. Ask them how much they're spending on any streaming show right now. It's three times that, easy, four times that. It was a hard job. So the fact that we all got on was a miracle. On the shows I've seen, unpleasantness is simply because people are not 100% certain about material or uncertain about a person that shouldn't be there. And I like that the cast, it felt like we were doing a very long play, and they were all our cast members. It felt very repertory, with Ben McKenzie at the top of that table. He was a prepared actor. He was word perfect. He became a great director, by the way, intelligent, mature, all those things. David every day, word perfect, brilliant notes on scripts, made it better.
Donal Logue: [We filmed] over three weeks. It basically [took] long enough to fit two episodes of Law and Order in at the same time. If you see the pilot and you see those two episodes, that was a three week chunk of my life… They always take more time because they want to get that [the pilot] right, because it's going to either launch it positively or, you know, have the opposite effect.
Ben McKenzie: By the time Gotham came around, I had done some time in the trenches, shooting a show like Southland, which was quite in your face and gritty. And there were no sides on Southland, you needed to show up prepared and know your lines, know your words, and go in there and do your job. I tried to bring that ethos to Gotham. But with the caveat, with younger actors, brilliant younger actors like David Mazouz and Camren Bicondova, with younger actors and with such a large cast, you needed to be sensitive to different needs for different people who were starting their career, who were in their careers, in different places. So I tried to bring a sense of camaraderie.
Sean Pertwee: We instantaneously became a company. It was very reminiscent, for me, of a theater company. I take my hat off to Ben McKenzie, because that was an awful lot down to Ben.
Ben McKenzie: Bruno is a pro. Danny is a pro. They were doing so much stuff as they’re building out the show, particularly a show as large as Gotham, with these massive sets shot all over New York City, dozens, if not hundreds of background artists in scenes and action scenes, fight scenes. So there's a lot of logistics and mechanics going on. I tried to do my part in terms of building a sense of connection amongst the cast.
Donal Logue: I will say one thing that was really odd was, there was a lot of hype to push the show, and there was a lot of behind the scenes camera stuff and B-roll and interviews. They had these teams of people who had to do the interviews on the making of and we were just busy… This was first day of Gotham, and someone asked me, “What's it like doing scenes with Jada Pinkett Smith?” And I said, “I don't know. This is day one. We haven't shot any scenes yet.” Like, it would be so good if it were possible to just let us shoot the pilot, and then we'll talk about the experience of shooting the pilot, but we haven't. We just started the pilot. And I'm not trying to be rude, I'm just being honest.
Robin Lord Taylor: I remember adrenaline. I had never been on a set or on a production that large, and so I remember the immensity of pressure when the camera comes down to me. It's this giant machine that works, and then for maybe 30 seconds to two minutes, it's just all about me not fucking it up. My first scene was the alleyway scene with Jada and Drew Powell, and I'm the umbrella boy, holding the umbrella. And we beat a poor gentleman senseless. We had rain, and an alley in Manhattan, which there aren't that many. So that was pretty special.
Donal Logue: It was a little harder for me because I was still doing Law and Order, so I wasn't going home at the end of the day. I was going to another job. I don't even know if those were, like, 130 hour work weeks or something. And then there were photo shoots and things… I remember laying on the ground and thinking, I am in deep trouble, physically.
Bruno Heller: I love being on sets because there's a kind of a suspension of time. So all of my time on the Gotham set… It feels like one long night shoot. I remember particular scenes from the pilot. Penguin on the wharf. Camren on the rooftop in Chinatown. And a sweatshop scene, running through a sweatshop. Danny is such a lovely director to watch because he's completely in command of every aspect of it. Knows exactly what everyone's doing. He'll do everybody's job, and is his own AD. And so being able to sit in a chair and watch him orchestrate that… Sometimes, as a writer, you're there struggling with, what's my motivations? On a show like this, by the time you're shooting, there's very little of that. I was on set, but very much as a spectator, I was just having fun watching it. Sometimes there'd be questions, story points, but mostly just enjoying the vibe.
Ben McKenzie: I remember taking a lot of deep breaths. God bless Danny Cannon, who did an exceptional job on the pilot and throughout the series.
Robin Lord Taylor: Danny, I learned right away, if we're moving on, that means it's great. He loves it. We're on the right track. I remember being like, “oh shit… he didn't say that was good,” … I need this affirmation. But Danny, he was like, “Look, you don't have to prove yourself anymore. You've done that. That job is over. So get out of your head that I need to tell you you're this or that, or brilliant, or whatever.” Of course, he was complimentary over the pilot and all of that. But fundamentally he taught me you've already proven yourself, so just get out there and fly.
Danny Cannon: There was one big test for me.Costumes were a huge part of Gotham because they informed the world. And I was worried one day because, it’s not just the expense of having a bunch of extras, [it’s] not wearing modern day clothes and putting their phones away and not having earbuds and not wearing bright red or bright yellow. You had to keep the tones all color-same, you know. And I put Penguin into that world.
Donal Logue: Danny and Bruno were both so smart about the technology and the cars. They could look ‘80s, it could look 1940s, it had this anachronistic crackliness to it. You really couldn't quite put it into a place or time… Danny had said something about Gotham. If you see a table, you can say that's Gotham, or it's not Gotham. It either fits stylistically with the world that we've created, or it clearly doesn't.
Robin Lord Taylor: I remember thinking… How are they going to make Queens in 2014 look like a different time? And I'm also wearing a three piece suit and a whole thing. And this has to stick out. But then you get there, and that's when I really felt the immensity of the production, because the sheer talent that goes into the set dressing, the cinematography, the lighting, the traffic control, we're shooting in this huge intersection in Queens under the subway… Every 30 seconds we would have to pause for sound so the train could pass over… They were able to change this busy intersection of Queens into Gotham City right away. It was like “boom.”
Danny Cannon: The shot looked good, and he looked good. And he's a very physical actor as well. My prep with Robin was all about the physicality. All the best movies in the world, you could watch them without sound, and you understand the character. In the pilot, something I offered up to Bruno, was he had Penguin being beaten up, and I said that somebody should break his knee. That's where the limp comes. That's where the walk comes [from]. Because in origin stories… It's not a joke. He's a real person. He broke his knee, and he didn't have the money to fix it, so he walks with a hobble, makes him look like a penguin.
Robin Lord Taylor: Seeing the characters in the real world was so stunning, because it was such a brilliant effort on so many people's parts to get it there.
Danny Cannon: Honestly, I was on cloud nine, however hard it was. It was hard, but I was on cloud nine. I was in my element.
Bruno Heller: I've been in far more intense pressure situations than [Gotham]. Danny was the right director for it. The pitch was… You could execute it wrong, I suppose. But no one could say, “oh, that's a bad idea. You shouldn't have done that.” … By the time we were making it, we're executing. It's like The Patriots, Bill Belichick, got a game plan. You practiced it, you have this team that you know. If anything goes wrong, that's just luck. I mean, yeah, there's pressure. There's time pressure and physical pressure. There's moment by moment pressure. I've been a failure in my life. So being in charge of the budget of a huge, big Hollywood TV show, how can that be a failure? How can that go wrong? If it doesn't, there's not success. That's not like crashing a rocket or bankrupting someone. It’s just money.
Danny Cannon: Pilots are like having babies. You know, men don't get to have babies. I don't get to have babies. But they're very painful. Evidently there's a chemical in the brain, in the memory bank, which erases that painful part. So people just keep having kids. Otherwise, if you can remember the pain, you wouldn't go back and do it again. So it's kind of like that pain goes away. It's like childbirth. I think it was really painful. I can't remember it for some reason, and I'm just going to do it again. And that's what pilot directing is like.
Sean Pertwee recalls his first day on set, and meeting the, at the time, CCO of DC Entertainment, Geoff Johns – but not realizing it was him.
Sean Pertwee: Geoff Johns was on set on the very first day. And I talked about my backstory. I had written this huge bible… I didn't realize it was Geoff Johns. I was telling this gentleman in a knack of an old baseball hat with paint all over it about my theories, not really realizing. But we got on famously well, and I didn't get fired, which is fantastic. I talked about how I'd written a bible for my character. I said because I trained with the SAS in this country, and I like the idea of the fact of the utility belt, or the physical version of the utility belt, being [Pennyworth] because you can’t fucking do everything. How did he learn that? Why would the richest man in the world, if not the universe, why would he have an East Ender looking after him? And to Bruno and I and Danny… The reason is because he was ex-services. They wanted him to be marine initially. And I said, because I trained with the SAS, I'd like to make him a Special Air Service, or SBS.. [They] went for SAS. And they said, “Absolutely,” Geoff agreed to that.
David Mazouz: Between takes [Sean] would be talking to me so excitedly about his background in the SAS, and how he how he got to know my Dad, and how he started working for me, and it was so fun to be able to, free flowing, talk about all that out in the open, make these decisions together about our background.
Sean Pertwee: It was frustrating, because in the pilot, you don't see any of that.
Meanwhile, Robin Lord Taylor recalls meeting Jada Pinkett Smith, who he worked closely with on the pilot, and throughout Season 1 of the series.
Robin Lord Taylor: I could not have been more nervous. By far the most, I don't want to say famous, because that doesn't really encapsulate the most iconic actor I've ever worked with so intimately. I was terrified, but from day one, she's a very intuitive person, and she immediately was disarming and was just so welcoming to me. And I'm like [at] her feet, kissing her shoe.
Donal Logue: Jada is such a good actor and… Especially at that time in the height of that level of celebrity, people forget: that's what Jada is.
Robin Lord Taylor: She's the consummate professional. She would talk to everybody between setups she did. Her chair was next to my chair. It was so, so reassuring to know that, on such a big project with such iconic actors and iconic characters, to know that we could still be a community and create something together in a way that you feel when you're doing a tiny play some place Off-Off-Broadway. It had that intimacy. And Jada was integral in making sure that was there, at least on set. I was really grateful for her positive energy.
Donal Logue: We talked a lot about kids, because our kids were of similar ages. And Will was incredibly nice. He'd come to visit on occasion.
Robin Lord Taylor: When we started doing press, I had never done it before, so I was terrified. They would put me with Jada at these junkets. It was like a master class of how to do this. And as you can tell, I'm still learning, she's really good about giving the perfect concise answer. It was just like watching a master, with poise and confidence do her thing. That was really one of the most amazing experiences I had.
However, not everything was sunny in Gotham City. In fact, New York was unseasonably cold that March, with temperatures overnight dropping into the 20s or teens. And since Gotham filmed a lot of night scenes, the cast spent a lot of filming of the pilot in the bitter cold.
Donal Logue: It was a freezing March in New York, I was struggling physically just to make it through and there was a lot of additional stuff, like photo shoots, promotional shoots, behind the scenes, interviews, etc.
Camren Bicondova: The only thing that I was worried about was how there was no warmth… In the pilot, you can see that I have rips in my jeans, and there were no tights under that. There were no leg warmers.
Sean Pertwee: When you're filming on the streets of Manhattan, no one told me about the interesting smells you come by in the summer, or how fucking freezing it is in the winter. I mean, I was either roasting hot and melting in 120 degrees in a cashmere three piece suit, or freezing in a cashmere three piece suit at minus 40.
Camren Bicondova: We were filming in 10, 15, degree weather on Long Island. It was my very first day on set. It was the day that I had to be on this 20 foot wall looking at the manor. And I was so cold that I ended up having to thaw my hands and feet in cold water when I went to go and have a school break because the gloves that I had, they didn't cover my hands at all.
David Mazouz: It was freezing cold. There was a scene towards the end of the pilot where I'm trying to conquer fear. I am on standing on the balcony of Wayne Manor with my arms out, and looks like I'm gonna maybe jump, but I'm just learning to conquer fear. And it's when Jim Gordon comes to Wayne Manor to update me on what's been happening with solving the murder. And that was the first shot we shot. I was not really on the balcony. I was on a platform connected to a wire, and I it was out in Long Island. I was only wearing a sweater. I remember with windchill, it was negative seven degrees… And I remember it was freaking freezing, but I was so excited to be starting.
Perhaps the single most important scene in the pilot episode was one that had already been committed to film a million times before
the killing of Thomas and Martha Wayne in Crime Alley, the inciting incident that leads Bruce Wayne on the path to becoming Batman.
Ben McKenzie: Talk about pressure. You need to film this iconic scene, this scene that appears in almost all the iterations of the Batman origin story, and yet you're doing it on a TV schedule, so you have very limited time. And of course, you're also working around a minor's hours. We had to be sensitive to the Union rules there.
Bruno Heller: It's only a moment, and you don't get a lot of time to be with those characters. It’s making the the family real, making it a mother, father and son, and instantly establishing the love between them, so that you register the loss. And it's not just an action scene, it’s all about David and his skill as an actor. That's the sort of scene that, what you don't want to do is write it. It's: did you cast it? You've got the set you've got the death of parents, and the child. For a writer to put something on top of that, is it needed? David's performance, seeing his his parents die... It's hard to do epic and close up. And Danny has that quality in spades.
Danny Cannon: I remember when the family had to die, that was a night scene, and we could only get that alleyway… It's one of the alleyways down in Chinatown where everyone wants to shoot. You think New York is full of alleyways, and then you realize all of those films you remember were all shot in downtown LA. So we got this alleyway. I always wanted to do that scene at the end. That scene, you're just worried about it. And then shooting days get away from you, and I'm shooting something during the day, and then the sun's going down, and then we had lunch, and they're like, “Alright, let's go to the alleyway.” And I'm like, “Oh… We're doing that now.” And you realize, “Oh, I'm about to do this iconic scene that's been shot several times before, and I have four hours to do it.”
Sean Pertwee: It's one of the most legendary, important parts of the canon that’s ever been committed to paper, to script or to film, the death of the Waynes.
Danny Cannon: The problem with the scene was both Camren —I just needed the one shot of her, really. And I wish I'd done it separately, but it had to go into that alleyway also ¸— And then David, because they were both underage, there was a strict cut off point. So not only are you going to this iconic scene, you can't make any mistakes, and you can't make it too involved, because you have four hours and there is nothing after that. You can't get back to the alleyway. And a lot of things had to happen in that alleyway. You know, it was not just the shooting [of the Waynes], but it was the aftermath of it too. So you just put that director hat on and that producer hat on at the same time, and I got us out there.
Sean Pertwee: The way that Danny shot it was just extraordinary… It was a pilot, and a huge pilot, and an important pilot, where every single shape or shadow… Everything's iconic, so you don't want to mess up.
David Mazouz: I remember it was also very cold. It was late at night. I really didn't know what to expect, to be honest, from the other actors when we started shooting, I don't think we rehearsed all that much. We shot it all in one night.
Ben McKenzie: No one's ever made the show before, right? So all of the crew members are figuring out how to work together, what the look is, what the feel is, all that stuff. So it was very late. It was a late night, the clock was always ticking, but Danny stayed cool under pressure, as he normally does, as he always does.
Danny Cannon: I wish I could have done a bit more detail, but I'm still proud of it. I remember David's mother coming up to me looking at the final shot, because she was near the monitor, and I was so scared. That last shot of the night was a big one. With his parents down on the floor, you pull away from David and as he screams, you realize that the way they're splayed out and the blood is splayed out is kind of like bat wings. That's what it's going for. Like a foreshadowing. And I remember being next to the operator on the crane, and it came back, and David nailed it. I saw the wings, and I looked at him, and his mother saw me, and I just turned around. I think I hugged her, because you're so scared you're not going to get that moment.
David Mazouz: It was scripted that I yell. It says, Bruce drops to his knees and lets out a guttural yell. And so that's what I was planning on doing. When I yelled for the first time, after I started screaming, everyone was taking off their headsets, like, oh my god, my ears are shot. Nobody expected me to yell that loudly. Danny came up to me with the DP and was like, ”wow, your yell. It's really loud.” I was like, “do you not want that?” And he's like, “No, it's good.” I was like, “yeah, man, my parents just died, right? I probably yelled pretty loud, right?” He was like, “yeah, no. Liked it. Keep doing it. Do it again. We're just going to lower your mic.”
Danny Cannon: Alan J. Pakula once said every scene is about one thing, if you get that one thing, the rest is just coverage. I remember not being able to sleep that night.
The other half of the scene was the aftermath of the murder, with Gordon and Bullock investigating the murder scene, Gordon meeting Bruce for the first time, and Alfred taking Bruce home.
Sean Pertwee: It was very tense, beautifully shot. I'd seen the the read through, I'd seen the scene, and it was just, it was so beautifully written… And Ben and Donal were absolutely on fire. It was late and cold, and we were pushing, pushing, pushing. I had to drive the Bentley in really quickly… And I decided to do a few improvisational things, where I said, “Keep your head up, don't let me see you cry,” which made Donal nearly burst into tears.
Donal Logue: It was a small choice by Sean, but I thought, man that is powerful.
David Mazouz: I'm talking to Gordon, I see Alfred pulls up to the scene, and I get up, throw the blanket down, and run to Alfred, and he says to me, and this wasn't scripted, “Keep your chin up. Look straight. Don't let them see you cry.” I think those are his exact words as we're walking to the limousine, and he said it under his breath, not scripted. You can still hear it if you watch the pilot. It was moments like that where you just felt, “oh, okay, that's, that's who I am.” It tells you so much. I learned that was the deal on screen. That was my real, genuine reaction.
Donal Logue: There are times in a scene where it's just in the script, all it is, is “Alfred comes and collects Bruce Wayne, and then he takes him.” Sean made a decision to make it a moment that speaks to the journey they're on. As an actor, I'm looking at another actor thinking, they're adding layers to this thing that if they weren't added, you would miss them. But when they are added, it’s what makes something really great.
Sean Pertwee: And that became the touchstone point for me and my relationship with [David]. When I did that, I thought I was going to get bollocks for it, actually, to be honest, because I was not scripted or anything, and that bit just came completely naturally. I saw this little man in pieces, and it seemed the right thing to do, and it worked. And that was the most sort of important moment for me from that evening, was that relationship.
Ben McKenzie: We got all of the shots that he needed, except for a little bit of coverage of the scene between Bruce and me. Which is so fitting as an actor, it’s hilarious. The actual emotional, substantive thing is the last to go, because on a practical level, you need to get all the bigger pieces first.
David Mazouz: There's the scene afterwards, in the aftermath, where Gordon and I are talking on the stairs, and we ended up having to reshoot some of the close ups in that scene against the green screen at the studio. I forget why. I don't know if it was sound issues or what.
Ben McKenzie: We ended up doing a pickup shot like the week after, out in the back lots, just to get a little bit closer on me and have a little bit of more coverage of my dialogue to him. I don't know if they use that or another take, but the iconic line from the pilot is Gordon consoling Bruce and saying, “There will be light,” giving him some sense of hope amidst the darkness. It's absolutely crucial, thematically for the series, so that you don't feel like, “Oh, Gotham's a bummer. It's always falling apart. Everyone's always killing each other.” You want to enjoy that delicious darkness, but you need the hope in order to kind of keep going throughout the series.
However, Heller recalls another scene in the pilot as being the most crucial: the final scene of the episode, where Gordon is told to kill Penguin on the docks by Bullock, with the latter begging for his life.
Bruno Heller: Gordon and Penguin on the dock there? To me, the carnival, comic book aspect of it… That's somebody else doing that. Where I felt, alright… This is a scene. It's in the canon. It makes sense as part of the great mythology of Batman. But it's not using Batman. And by the time you were there, there's a story developed, and they're real, and the world is real, and it's an engine that drives the thing forward, and it works, and it looks great. That's the moment.
Donal Logue: I think of that scene all the time because it's probably, to me, one of my favorite scenes I ever did in Gotham. Maybe the favorite.
Robin Lord Taylor: It's one of the six moments in my life I can't forget any single detail about. It's burnt into my mind, because that was the day that I knew my life was forever changed. And I don't know why it was that day and not one of the previous days that we shot, but I think it was the emotion of the scene.
Ben McKenzie: That's one of the scenes I will always remember, [it’s] lodged in my memory.
Donal Logue: Jim Gordon's this new rookie I've been stuck with and I say, this is what you're going to do. You're going to march this guy down to the end of this pier, and you're going to put a bullet in his head, because this is danger, and this person represents chaos. Gordon is a by the book kind of guy, and he's like, you know this is morally wrong. And I say, you've been to war, right? So, you know, sometimes you gotta do bad things, to do good. And I stand by that. It's so weird. It's such a cruel and terrible act. But had Penguin been stopped at that point, countless others would have been saved from the mayhem and the violence that this person could create, and did create… in a weird way, for the sake of Gotham, I don't think Bullock was necessarily wrong.
Ben McKenzie: I'm in this difficult position where I ought to kill him, I have every reason to get rid of him. And yet, being the moral center of the show and the grounded person that Gordon is, he obviously can't do that, and the audience feels that tension… It’s not like Jim Gordon can put a bullet in somebody's head. It goes against everything that he's supposed to stand for. And the day itself was just perfect, because it was kind of wet and damp and cold. We shot the pilot in March in New York, and it happened to be particularly cold that week or two when we shot, and so it was gloomy and awful. Robin and I were there on the edge in this very intense interaction where I was grabbing him roughly by the lapel in order to shove him backwards and sell what I was quote, unquote doing to Donal Logue’s character, Harvey Bullock, so that he would see me kill him, or think that I killed him. And I kept grabbing [Robin] so roughly that after a while – poor Robin is the sweetest guy in the world, [he] said, “I'm getting a little bruised here. Would you mind not grabbing me quite so roughly?” He opened up his shirt, [and there were] purple splotches all over his chest.
Robin Lord Taylor: There's something about my connection to Ben. He being such a brilliant actor and an established working actor who's done some amazing projects, and then me, totally unknown, coming out of nowhere. Penguin, in begging with Jim to acknowledge that he knows things about Gotham City, there's a reason for him to be there. I know I'm paraphrasing in a lot of ways, but that's sort of the sensibility of the scene. And in real life, it's me with Ben being like, “you know, we're in this together. I'm ready to bring something to this. You have no idea.” There's a parallel between those emotions, and it built a really brilliant collaboration and connection between me and Ben McKenzie as actors and as friends. It was just a moment where we connected and again, the enormity of the scene and the show and the character and all of that, and then the location, and then my own personal life, how it's all changing in that moment. It's kind of breathtaking. I'll never forget that thing.
Ben McKenzie: Watching the pilot back again and seeing that scene, it's all there. All the intensity, the look and the feel of it is, in my opinion, spot on. So I will always remember that scene fondly.
Donal Logue: So there's a guy named Ed Heavey, who was my stand in. He's also does stunts, and he's also one of my closest friends. I remember seeing Ed that day, and he was wearing a suit. And I said, “Wow, you're going deep for standing in and just lining up the shot.” And he said, “No, I just came from a funeral.” And I said, “Whose funeral?” And he said, “My mom's.” And I was like, “Ed, what are you doing here, man?” And he's like, “I've got three kids.” There's eight million human stories in Gotham City, right? There are these human stories going on while you're telling these fictional stories.
By the beginning of April, the pilot had wrapped.
And very quickly, Fox showed its enthusiasm for the show by first officially greenlighting it on May 5, 2014 with “at least” 13 episodes – and then confirming the show for 16 episodes on May 12.
Bruno Heller: I didn't know it was a done deal until I saw Danny's first cut. I couldn't imagine anyone not going “right well, we want a full order of this tomorrow.” As soon as I saw the first dailies of David and Ben, it was so obvious that we delivered what they asked for and exactly what we said we were going to deliver. Danny had delivered in spades. I wasn't waiting in nervous expectation to see if they would pick it up or not.
Danny Cannon: Putting a producer's hat on the pilot idea is good. You don't want to spend a ton of money and then watch something and go, “Oh, that wasn't what I was thinking at all.” So I understand. But with something like Gotham, when you're world building, you rolled that boulder down the hill and you've got to jump on board. You've got to gather some momentum and build and teach people the world and find the right DP and find the right composer and all of that kind of stuff. So yes, it was a blessing on Gotham that we weren't just thinking about doing a pilot, because that would have been a ton of work.
Robin Lord Taylor: Our brilliant head of the hair department, Theresa Marra-Siliceo said, and she's been in the business for several years, working many shows with very brilliant collaborators... We were looking at the sets in stage. And she was like, “You know, they don't build this shit if it's not going to run.” … I don't know if you ever visited GCPD, but that set was unreal. There is no way that they are going to throw this down and then scrap it. I mean, nowadays I would totally believe that. But for some reason back then, I was like, “No, we got this thing.”
David Mazouz: We all knew this show was different. This show was special. The amount of executives that had their hands in this show, the amount of money that had so obviously gone into it, the amount of thought and care and the unique world that it was a part of it, there was never really a question that it was going to go to series, especially after showing up for that table read and shooting that pilot. I remember where my head was at, I have to figure out how I'm going to move to New York and where I'm going to live and where my apartment is going to be. There were never concerns about whether the show is going to get a series order. Maybe this is cocky for me to say, but it felt inevitable. It wasn't because of me. It was just because it felt like such a huge machine. It was coming off the back of the Batman trilogy of Christian Bale, and I knew it was what I wanted to watch. I remember thinking when I was auditioning, “whether I get it or not I'm going to watch this show. I'm so curious what they're going to do. How are they going to make a Batman TV show? Like, that's going to be cool.” That was my feeling. But again, I was 12, so.
Donal Logue: I knew Gotham was going to work out. There was really no doubt that was absolutely true. If Gotham was technically a pilot that was shot, not picked up, I had a gig. I had that job. But I knew Gotham was too rich a world, too big a world that it would have success [and] go the distance on television. I've certainly, with Knights of Prosperity, Terriers, countless pilots…. I've had plenty of jobs that I was on where, you know, man, I hope this thing goes. But I had no doubt Gotham would go longer.
Bruno Heller: The real hassle, as I recall, was that they kept asking for more as we delivered. They kept asking for more episodes in the season, which is tough story wise, and also tough on the actors. But on the other hand, the energy that you, the cast, gets from being on a successful show mitigates that.
Donal Logue: Gotham was looked at as universally, a great gig with great people. [But it] was very hard. It was a lot of night shoots. It was a big machine. It was a huge circus to move around. And 16 episodes, because it's so big and was so hard, 16 episodes was probably a more manageable load than 22 a season. But the goal is to get to a number, the syndication number, and at smaller episodic rates per season, it takes so many seasons to get to the magic number, which is usually 100.
With the show officially a go, it was time to assemble the writers’ room and get cracking on the full season order. One of the first additions to the series was writer John Stephens, who would go on to become part of the troika of men running Gotham, along with Danny Cannon and Bruno Heller.
John Stephens (EP, Writer): I had been off writing books for a few years, and I was just starting to get back thinking about writing for television again. And then I got a call from Warner Brothers, from someone in development saying they had the Gotham project, and would I be up for meeting on it? And so I went in and met with Bruno. And at the end of the meeting, he offered me the job
Bruno Heller: John is both a rigorous and very disciplined writer and someone with a great, fantastic Alice in Wonderland imagination, and very in tune with a fantasy world and elevated realism. And he's also a lovely, calm, unegotistical guy. He's much more organized and a much, much better producer than me. He gets up at like, four in the morning and exercises for an hour and then does three hours of work and then has his breakfast, and I'm not functional till middle of the afternoon. So we we went well together. And as the show rolled on, John took over.
John Stephens: [Bruno]’s a super interesting guy. He's not your typical television writer. He has a really idiosyncratic and very unique perspective that's, as a writer, extremely appealing, because you knew what he was going to give you was going to be unique.
Danny Cannon: Bruno, even though he did this brilliant pilot and he came back and did the first episode, he wanted to do other things. So he put John in charge… And he would visit us all the time. That was a really good way to do a show.
John Stephens: [Bruno] had figured out the season. We didn't really have any scripts necessarily. But he had a good sense of at least the first few episodes, what he wanted the, for lack of a better term, cases to be like, the villains to be in the particular episodes coming up. And he had a good sense of the arcs coming forward.
Sean Pertwee: The whole thing really started working on day one so well because they wrote the first 12 episodes to begin with, and then it was commissioned to 16. We were given 16, and then 22. But in the early episodes, every strand… I remember them telling me, they said, it's like throwing a bowl of spaghetti at a wall, see what strand sticks. And very fortunately, every strand sort of stuck, really, because everyone was so bloody good.
John Stephens: I ended up running the room deeper into season one. A lot of it was just having production on the other side of the country is quite difficult. So either Danny or Bruno or I would have to be in New York at the time. We ended up having to swap back and forth entirely. But it was a really fluid environment, stepping in at different times.
Bruno Heller: I remember this distinctly, more than once at Comic-Con, people complimenting me on a [bit] that was entirely John's… The first time it happened, I'd say, “Oh, actually, that was John Stephens who wrote that,” and by the fourth or fifth time, I would just say, “thank you very much.”
John Stephens: There's so many writers out there, and I'm always looking forward to reading Bruno's scripts, because I always know he's going to do something really interesting, and he's such an excellent writer. So I think fundamentally, I always respected whatever he was going to do. And with Danny, whenever he shot anything, I always knew it was going to be incredibly exciting.
Bruno Heller: It's a tough job, running a team like he did, and keeping that ball rolling. But it's not really my ball or Danny's ball. It's a communal ball that we were allowed to play with.
Danny Cannon: We had a really strong thing going. We had a great lead writer in Bruno. We had the fantastic John Stephens. And I was so passionate about my contribution to that team, especially the cast. But I think the crew, even though it was a hard pilot in horrible weather, the crew… Everyone stayed. No one left. I had the same crew for five years. Everyone was exactly in the same position. They loved that job there. We still talk about it online. I'm still friends with everybody.
Bruno Heller: We got along very well, I think partly because, if I pride myself on one thing in this business, I'm willing to tell you what I'm no good at, and when there's people around who are much better at it than me, I'll let them do their thing without trying to exert control over it.
Production began again in the early summer of 2014
after the series pick-up, and would run until March 24, 2015 – well past the premiere of the pilot.
Ben McKenzie: One of the things that I insisted upon very early on was table reads before every episode. It's one thing that John Wells always did in his shows. They can be a bit of a logistical nightmare, because the director for that episode is out there prepping, and they've got all their department heads. It's a big machine, and they need to take a break and come back to the office in order to have the table read. But I thought it was kind of crucial. It's the only time that the cast gets together, because often the plot lines are separate, and it's the only time that the writer and the director are able to hear the words that are going to be spoken before you're actually on set rehearsing.
Sean Pertwee: It was an essential part of our bonding process that we all got together to find out what was occurring in the world that we were creating, and it really helped. It really bonded us together. But we were incredibly close from day one anyway, and there were no shenanigans. There was no Hollywood bad behavior.
Ben McKenzie: It's crucial to me to give a sense of camaraderie and also to keep the lines of communication open. It was invaluable both as an actor, but also as a writer and director, to be able to understand, oh, okay, I thought this scene was going to go this way, but now that I'm hearing it out loud, I actually want to tweak it here or there. I want to ask the cast members what they think of their plot lines. There's always a balance. And it's not as though the cast gets to dictate to the producers, writers and directors what happens, but their input is invaluable. And why shouldn't you have that? So I just remember very early on putting my foot down there. It's an expensive thing, and I was clear that it was not mandatory for cast members to show up if it didn't work for them. But what ended up happening, which was sort of wonderful and a validation was that, for the most part, people always showed up. If they were in an episode, they were there. And it really provided a sense of togetherness and a sense of purpose for the show.
One early addition to the series? Robin Lord Taylor started wearing bottlecaps in his shoes in order to capture The Penguin’s distinctive walk.
Robin Lord Taylor: It was in the summer. We were in Chinatown, massive scene with bus and background. It was just, like, huge, chaotic. And it's my final scene in the episode where I step off the bus, look around, and I say, “I'm home,” and then the bus goes away, and I walk across the street into the distance. And that's the final shot of me in the episode. It wasn't until I got to the chair where I realized, “fuck, I didn't limp,” And they'd already moved the cameras, they already moved on. The bus had been wrapped. Everybody was gone. And I felt mortified. I felt like, in that moment that I had let down my acting teacher, my parents, I just felt like such an idiot. And so I run up to the director, and he was like, well, we're moving on. We'll cut around it. It's fine. And I still felt like crap.
Danny Cannon: I was back in LA editing… [Robin] called me, and I said, “It's okay. Let me look at it.” And, yeah, it was a mistake.
Robin Lord Taylor: It was my wardrobe assistant, Kyle McCoy, and she said to me, and she worked on Broadway many times, she was like, “Well, why don't you put a bottle cap in your shoe?” It's an old theater trick. It's an old Stella Adler trick, it was for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof to help the actor who was playing Brick, who had a broken leg. She was like, put a rock in your shoe, make it real for yourself. And that's what I did.
Danny Cannon: I said, “You shouldn't do that.” But from that point onwards, he liked the idea of putting bottle caps in his shoes, because then he wouldn't forget. But he didn't need to do that.
Robin Lord Taylor: I had it there for two more seasons. At one point we downgraded to two quarters stacked on top of each other. And then after that, I was like, okay, it's in my body.
Danny Cannon: I would never get into the mind of an actor, but they take the character they're playing very personally. They take them home with them. And I think that was just his reminder. He always had a piece of Penguin with him in his shoe.
One of the key relationships that developed on set during the filming of Season 1 was between David Mazouz and Sean Pertwee.
Danny Cannon: What was brilliant about David was he's such a serious person, he's such an intelligent person, and he's very mature. And therefore the way he approached it was very pragmatic. It wasn't loose cannon. [He] learnt the lines. He understood the lines. And occasionally [he’d] walk up to Bruno, or whoever was on set and go, “when I say this, am I thinking right when I you know?” And it was like, “Yes, I wish more adult actors would do that.” The guy thought about it a lot and understood it and discussed it.
Sean Pertwee: David was a kind young man that was extremely easy to be around and work with. The wonderful thing about our profession is that it's not ageist. You can work with someone who's eight to someone who's 88 and you're you still have the same fears, the same concerns, the same paranoias, the same loves, hates, whatever. And we definitely had that.
Danny Cannon: Sean's scenes were always with David. And their closeness, it's unbelievable. Sean knew the way to make those scenes better was to really make David feel comfortable. And the way he did that, he shared his life with him. I would see them on their phones all the time, talking about stuff and telling stories, and Sean telling him a long story about his dad.
Sean Pertwee: He did become a sort of bizarre surrogate son in many respects. I'd forget that he was young [and] I was a little salty probably half the time, as was the rest of the crew. But he loved that, and he thrived on that. In fact, he used to come over to the house and play with my son when he was there, play football and things like that, and just play FIFA and whatever.
David Mazouz: Sean is just like that, where he loves to delve into our relationship, which I loved. It taught me so much. I'm still so thankful that I was able to work with him for so many years, and he was able to mentor me in the way that he did.
Sean Pertwee: My wife said a very interesting thing. She said, I wonder how Freddie, my son, feels about it. My son's [named] Alfred, bizarrely. You know, how he felt about it, because it must have been tough on him as well, because I was away there having a surrogate son, and I wasn't there for my son. So it was an easy pull to draw from when it came to some of the emotional stuff as well.
David Mazouz: The show was a story of what felt like different islands. Throughout all five seasons, I had one, two scenes with Cory Michael Smith, who played the Riddler. We're both in almost every episode, and throughout 100 episodes, only two scenes together. It's pretty crazy. And I think with Robin Lord Taylor, I had not that many more, maybe three or four scenes with him. So a lot of the characters were really living in their own worlds. And [Sean] was my world. He was the other half of the world that I was inhabiting.
Sean Pertwee: I wasn't aware of what other people were doing. Stylistically, we were sort of hermetically sealed in the Wayne Manor library… The most important moment for me was when [we were] not just physically, but mentally allowed out of the library.
David Mazouz: Episode eight of season one, was the first time we got to get out of the house.
Sean Pertwee: I take him to school, there's Tommy [Elliott] who's bullying him, and I take him to his bully's house, and I give him his father's watch so he can give Tommy an absolute pounding with his father's watch as an uncle duster.
David Mazouz: Alfred's there, and Tommy thinks that Alfred's gonna get me in trouble for it, and Alfred chastises him… It was improvised. Afterward, he goes, “alright, Master Bruce, want to get some pancakes?” That was Sean.
Sean Pertwee: It's their first bonding moment. And it's a bizarre one, because it's through a form of violence, but it's through the Batman ethic of never allow a bully, stand up for the little guy. The whole mantra, Batman's mantra really germinates from that one scene. So it was incredibly important. I love it because we were discovering it for the first time, ourselves, and I thought it really worked.
David Mazouz: I mean, it's a very unique relationship. It's somebody who's technically hired help, but also a father figure, but also more of a friend and a mentor in this mansion, raising one of the richest kids in America. There's a lot of layers to it, and a lot of times when there's a lot of layers to something like that, to a character, to a relationship, I think it can very easily hinder the actor or the actors, because they don't know what to play exactly. It's not so easy. But with Sean, it was just very easy.
Sean Pertwee: I used to ask him, say, “Now, how do you think that went?” And I'm suddenly realizing, I’ve been acting for 30 years at that stage, or 25 years or something. And I'm asking an 11 year old how he thought I did… Because he was so good. And then he'd go upstairs and study physics, and then 15 minutes later come back down and do one of these huge emotional sequences.
Beyond Pertwee and Mazouz, other actors also found the vibes were very good while filming Season 1. Basically, they loved doing their jobs.
Camren Bicondova: When we were on set, I definitely felt protected, and that's one of the many reasons why I was so blessed with that job, especially as a teenage girl. I never once felt taken advantage of or disregarded by the cast members themselves or even the crew. They always took care of me, which I know isn't a lot of people's experience, especially when there's a really big age gap.
Robin Lord Taylor: I remember not really wanting to know the full arc of the season. It's going to sound really strange because I'm talking about a super villain. Just to acknowledge that. But there are a lot of interesting parallels between what Oswald was going through in that first season and also what I was going through in my career. Both people who are virtually unknown, who are starting off from a place of, I would say, low status… And then being thrust into this insane environment.
Camren Bicondova: I never had to drag my feet to work. Because, even if I was going through something at home, I knew that we were going to have a good time with each other on set. And for that, I'm so grateful, because I know that that's not always the experience for people on shows.
Robin Lord Taylor: There was one scene in season one where [Penguin and Riddler] meet in GCPD, and it's a very kind of awkward, like a throwaway scene, but I believe that it's the first time that we see two canon villains interacting on Gotham. So just that, in itself, has its own energy behind it… Cory and I knew the significance of it. It's like lightning in a bottle, sometimes, you just have natural chemistry with someone, and it just pops. We had a massive crew who were professionals to the utmost degree. While you're shooting, people are working 16 hours and when they're not doing something actively, they're doing their own thing.
Everyone watched that scene. Every crew member. And I remember feeling that energy and that significance behind it. And then on top of it, to have chemistry like that with another actor, it just felt super special. It felt bigger than the room we were shooting it in.
Ben McKenzie: You're trying to be sensitive to everyone's needs. People are living their lives at the same time they're shooting and sometimes it's just listening to them, just hearing them out, just having a coffee or sitting by the craft service table and understanding where they're coming from. Because most of the time, actors just want to be heard. They just want to be able to express what's on their mind. And sometimes the powers that be don't have the time, because they're out there trying to make the show. So if I could serve that role, I was happy to.
John Stephens: [Ben’s] very intelligent, he's very smart. He's really well educated. So he was a real delight to work with, because you could be pitching at a very high level. He really digs into the material. He did it at The OC as well, when he was wanting to know why he was doing certain things, and questioning things in a really good and constructive way. And that continued on Gotham in a way that made both shows better. So it was helpful to have that familiarity with Ben, because you knew what he was going to bring to the table.
Robin Lord Taylor: Somewhere in Season 1, I really started to feel like I was in the groove… You get a couple episodes in, and then the writers start writing to you. They start writing for your voice and what you are naturally bringing to the character. They start juicing it up with more of that stuff, if that makes any sense… I was extremely fortunate because I was prominently featured in Season 1, so I was able to have more time in the writers’ heads.
Donal Logue: We did something remarkable on Gotham, which I've never seen happen on a show. One night it was particularly difficult shooting. It was a summer night next to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, it was kind of abandoned, it was just mosquitoes, and hot… I don't know if tempers flared, but there was frustration. There was this guy in the middle of it named Gerard Sava, who was just cool as a cucumber. He was the camera operator. He was this brilliant cameraman and beautiful soul and very smart, erudite, always a solid citizen. And he's in the midst of this.
So I have this weird idea. At the craft service table, they have those Nature Valley bars, the oatmeal green. I had this weight on the cast. Especially being an actor you get to do things that other people would be immediately dismissed if they tried to do on a set. But I was like, “Stop work. I'm presenting the Nature Valley crew member of the day award to Gerard Savas.” So every day after that, we did a crew member of the day award, the Nature Valley crew member of the day award. We stopped, made an announcement, the person came forward, they got their award. There were cheers and there was goodness.
Ed Heavey and I, we had a list of everybody that worked in the office, everybody that worked behind the scenes. Everybody had to win the award. And there were enough days of shooting to make sure that at some point, everybody in the broader Gotham family was called out, recognized and walked in front of the crew, while people cheered and clapped.
It's a hard job. The hours are hard, especially for the crew, way more so than for us. To take the time for Gotham to do that, it changed the nature of that job. And you know, a lot of people are like, “Dude, I still have that Nature Valley bar.”
One other important relationship to both the show and the canon is the one between Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne.
However, Gotham was starting with kids aged 13 and 15 – complicating things somewhat.
David Mazouz: I definitely had a special connection with Camren Bicondova right away, just because we were both under the age of 18. I was 13 and she was 15 at the time, and so just being around the same age definitely felt like she was in my group a little bit… I was there with my mom, and Camren was there with her mom.
Camren Bicondova: Looking back, we didn't talk about it much. I know that he was my first technical kiss, and that was so embarrassing.
David Mazouz: I was nervous, man, to be honest, I was so nervous because episode 10, we had our first kiss, and that was my first kiss. That was the first time I ever kissed a girl. And I knew it was coming. I was aware before that script came out, I knew it was gonna come at some point, because that's what everybody was building towards. And at the same time, all my friends back at home in LA were all starting to kiss girls for the first time. And so I remember I was freaking out that day. I kept asking the makeup artist for more chapstick, because I was nervous my lips were gonna be too dry.
Camren Bicondova: I felt so bad for him, too, because I'm pretty sure it was his first kiss, and he was [13], and I was [15], and so that was, I think I can speak for both of us, that was awkward for us.
David Mazouz: Camren came up to me after, and we did it in a rehearsal, but the whole crew was there, so it was like 30 people watching us and I think Camren was really nervous too. She told me that later and after we kissed for the first time – which crazy feeling, wow, that's what kissing is. That's insane. So weird place to be experiencing this for the first time, but still great. We're waiting for them to set up the cameras after the rehearsal. And she came up to me with her mom right behind her, and handed me a Hershey's Kiss and said, “I'm giving you a kiss on screen, so I'll give you a kiss off screen,” or something like that. And it really diffused both of our tension that we had, and our nervousness.
Camren Bicondova: I know that there was pressure for him, but I don't know if he let it affect him. What I do know is that we both had similar approaches in that we wanted both of them to stand alone and not use other renditions to impact what we did and what we portrayed… That not only helped protect us mentally, but that also allowed fans to learn like, okay, you can't have expectations for the show, because it's a first. This is the first of its kind, and what you know is not entirely or exactly what you're gonna get… At least for me, that noise was blocked out because I was like, they don't know what they're mad about.
David Mazouz: We were doing so many adult things. Not necessarily kissing, but just being on set, working around all other adults. We were the only two kids there doing a bunch of stunts. Especially her, she was leaping off of buildings in the pilot, but we both had a lot of fairly adult work to do from the very beginning, and in that mature environment we were there for each other, to remind each other that we were kids and that it was okay to have fun and and we let our silliness out around each other, for sure. I'm very thankful for that experience, to have a partner in that.
The show that I was on before, Touch, was much shorter. It went on for two years, and I was the only regular kid on that show. And not that it was lonely or anything, but it was nice to have someone to relate to that was looking at the same memes that I was in between takes, and that knew the trends of what was happening.
I remember on other sets I was constantly, consciously and unconsciously, creating talking points that an adult could relate to, so that I could socialize with my coworkers. They’re all 30 years older than me. I remember on a movie that I did called The Darkness with Kevin Bacon, he was really into… This is embarrassing, admitting this right now, but he was really into the, I think it was The Clippers. Maybe it was Lakers, but I think it was The Clippers. And I was not into basketball, but I wanted to have something to talk to him about. It was basketball season, so I'd watch all the highlights, the day before set, just so that I'd be like, “you saw so and so hit nine threes last night?” And he'd be like, “yeah, it was crazy.” I would just listen to the highlights, whatever the commentators said and be able to repeat that back. And it wasn't like I was faking it, but my point is, I really wanted to relate to all of these adults, and I was capable of doing that. I think I was a fairly mature kid. But it was also nice to not have to do that around Camren.
Camren Bicondova: I do know that David studied comics. I didn't study the comics very much. Some fans would disagree with that, but that actually helped me. The only comics that I studied were the older ones, the very first ones. But I think that we were both focused on, okay, what is in front of us right now. Who are we playing? And what are they doing right now, and where are they going now? And honestly, it was a very different approach from what the comics were showing, because no comics had shown Bruce Wayne from 14 to 20.
John Stephens: There was a lot of responsibility to it, because I've worked with young actors before, and it's very difficult for them in terms of the level of attention they're getting, and also when their characters are doing things which they themselves might not yet be doing, whether it's romantic situations or violence or whatever sort of adult-ish content you're talking about. So there was a sense on our part not to push that relationship forward too quickly at all, to really let it play out and let them grow into their roles and grow more comfortable with the roles and their position on the show, as leaders on the show, before that evolved. So really it was kind of like letting it evolve naturally… Letting the relationship evolve naturally as the characters and actors grew up.
The official broadcast premiere of the show was still months away, but the pilot got several screening opportunities with cast, crew, and others.
First up were two early “tastemakers” screenings on June 12, 2014: one in New York, one in LA.
David Mazouz: I had already seen the pilot at that point… During upfronts, they had given us a disc of all of the pilots that were being talked about, and we got to watch all the pilots that year, and Gotham was definitely on there.
Danny Cannon: There was one screening in LA which they asked me to go to and do some question and answer stuff… I walked into a room. I'm very nervous. I'm usually terrible in interviews, I come across as grumpy. There's a reason I'm not an actor. Everyone's buzzing as I walked by, I never normally let myself make eye contact with reviewers and critics and journalists, [but] I kind of glanced and they were looking right at me, and I was like, “Well, you don't hate this.”
Also at the screening at the iPic in Westwood was Camren Bicondova, who didn’t know at the time that her character, Selina Kyle, was in the very first shot of the series.
Camren Bicondova: At the screening in LA, they rented out this massive theater, and all of our families were there. And I was in shock. Honestly, because it wasn't the first thing that I shot. It was one of the last scenes that we shot during the pilot. And so it didn't dawn on me that I was going to be the opening scene for this entire series. And then once we saw it, I teared up. I honestly teared up because, I don't know. l was a professional dancer, and this was my first major television job, a major acting job, and I don't come from a family in the industry. My family are not artists at all.I'm just the weirdo in my family. I'm just this girl who's had a lot of talent from a young age and luckily had parents who supported me and sacrificed a lot so that I could audition while I'm going to school.
It showed me this was going to be a really big deal, and that I was holding treasure in my hand. It did cause some nerves to kick in for the second episode. Like, oh my gosh, I opened this entire series, and the first thing that people see when they watch this. And then I'm the seventh person to play this character, but the first woman, or young woman at the time, to play this rendition of her. This is legendary. I didn't know how to grasp it.
David Mazouz: I was doing press while the screening was happening. What I remember about that screening was, it was the first time.And I remember it was Danny and Bruno and their families, it was the first time that I really got a chance to talk to them. It was the first time I got to know them, and they really got to know me and my mom, and we weren't in a rush on set… I got to develop that relationship [with them] for the first time. That was a really cool experience for me, because I admired both of them so much and all the work they were doing.
Danny Cannon: Donal Logue… He said, as we were celebrating that moment… “Enjoy this, because I think we're one of the last battleships to leave the harbor.” Streaming is coming and, network television is about advertising, and we had this long conversation about what streaming was going to do, and he nailed it. He knew exactly what was going to happen, and it happened.
Donal Logue: All of these network shows that used to be on your schedule with 22 episode orders a year, we knew that we were one of the last aircraft carriers of that ilk to leave the port. The writing was on the wall. Now it's not necessarily true. I've been working on The Equalizer and CBS traditionally has shows like Blue Bloods and things. But they skew to an older viewership that still likes television. I still like television. I still like cable, I still like having the local news and things like that. But yeah, we were one of the last ships out.
Danny Cannon: One year later, Netflix came on and helped us with the budget with Warner Brothers, very successfully. So thank you, Netflix. But if we had sold that show to Netflix instead of Fox, I don't know what the difference would have been.
Beyond the tastemakers screenings, the bigger test came that July when the pilot screened at San Diego Comic-Con, to thousands of (potential) fans. The series was presented as part of a three-hour long block of Warner Bros. shows on July 26, 2014, with cast and crew in attendance. The massive panel included Gotham, Constantine, The Flash, and Arrow.
Camren Bicondova: I remember the first time that we were on, for one of the San Diego Comic-Cons, we were part of this group who went on one of Warner Brothers' private jets. And I just remember we were all having a grand old time. Like, who are we? Just here we are on a private plane on our way to Comic-Con, where we're getting treated like freaking royalty.
Donal Logue: We were so busy with the shooting schedule. At that time, Ben and I were there every day, all day, and other people weren't. They were working much more infrequently, in piecemeal. Because Ben and I were going late Friday into Saturday morning, and then starting super early on Monday, to get us there for the Comic-Con they had this private jet set up, which was absolutely a once in a lifetime kind of thing. On a private jet with my cast mates. Like, holy smokes, this is pretty intense.
Ben McKenzie: Warner Brothers really wanted to put their stamp on Comic-Con that year and show the variety of shows that they had, all of which were successful. We were the latest addition to that. So it was great to be there. And it was also great not to have to do that again the next year.
David Mazouz: It was huge… I’m such an actor, I remember the times when I was so nervous, because I think I had two questions on that panel. There were like 16 other people on the panel, and it was just a huge auditorium.There were so many people backstage.
Donal Logue: I remember all these people in this huge hall screaming for [Arrow star] Stephen Amell to show them his abs. And then he did. And I just thought, this is so ridiculous, and there's never going to be a universe where someone's like, to me, show us your abs.
Bruno Heller: By that stage, this was Danny's presentation of a work by Danny. I knew he'd done a brilliant job. I knew that no one could have done it better than that. I thought the script, if I'd had my druthers, and I'm sure I was probably wrong, I would have done it in a far slower roll, more drama, less running about. [But] the script was good, the directing was great, and the performances were great. And people reacted to it exactly as I expected.
Danny Cannon: It was a sacred bubble that we lived in. It was confusing sometimes, because Warner Brothers were doing their other DC shows on The CW, and they're all in Vancouver, and they were very bright, and there were lots of costumes. We went to Comic-Con, and they showed the trailer for Flash and the other ones… Then they put Gotham next to it, and you could see people being like, “they’redifferent worlds.” And it suddenly occurred to me, did Warner Bros want this to be the same world as that? And then they combined those CW shows and started integrating them and swapping characters and stuff. And I was like, nobody ever called us. We were the red-headed stepchild, I think.
David Mazouz: I don't really remember what people were saying about the show. I don't even know how many people had watched it at that point. I remember Jada with her bat. She brought a bat. She brought a baseball bat to all the press events that we were doing to introduce her, introduce Fish Mooney to the world, and it was like a steel baseball bat.
Bruno Heller: You know, Comic-Con… It can be a poisoned chalice, because it's the people who really care and really love this stuff and if you've tried to deliver what they would like to see, and you do that sincerely, without fucking about or playing tricks on them… They will love it. It's the intended audience for a show like Gotham. So I would have been very surprised if people hadn't liked it. It went about as well as I expected it to. I was very confident.
David Mazouz: I remember [it] being a super busy weekend, and it was my first time at Comic-Con. I was more blown away by Comic-Con and the scale of the show and this massive panel that we were doing with all the other Warner Brothers shows. I was 13 at this point, summer after I turned 13, I was into comic books. I loved Batman. All of this was like, whoa. I was wide-eyed, mouth open the entire weekend, just in awe of all the stuff around me. I was a huge fan of Chuck, and Zachary Levi was there… and I got to meet him, and that was a huge highlight.
I didn’t have the sense to be nervous if people liked our show, and what people were saying and what events I was getting invited to. I didn't have enough sense to care about any of that. I was just so excited to be there, and I also wasn't even really thinking about my role there. I was just excited about going to Comic-Con for the first time, and about seeing people that I was a fan of.
There was so much Gotham advertisement in San Diego, throughout the whole city that weekend. There were trams that go through the city, and there were massive Gotham billboards on the side of the trams, and my face was there, and that was a huge deal for me. And that was the stuff that I was paying attention to. I probably should have been paying attention to the reaction? What were people saying? But I can't remember it. I think just because I didn't even know I was supposed to care about that at the time.
John Stephens and Robin Lord Taylor didn’t watch the pilot for the first time until the official premiere in New York City, in September, before the premiere on Fox.
John Stephens: The danger with television, at least back then, is when you blow up television to the big screen, it doesn't look so great. But I actually thought that it looked great, it still looked powerful and amazing. Danny and Dave Stockton had done a great job putting it together. So, yeah, it was super fun to see it with a crowd.
Robin Lord Taylor: The interesting thing for me as an actor, it's always been very difficult for me to watch myself, but for some reason there was something about the show, and I don't know if it was because of the styling, because physically, I looked so different, and just the show itself was so stylized. It was the first time that I could actually watch myself and not have a total panic attack.
The pilot premiered on Fox on September 22, 2014.
The series debuted strong with 8.21 million viewers, growing to 14.45 million when DVR viewing was factored in. However, the cast and crew were at that point too busy filming Season 1 to celebrate.
Donal Logue: I'd been through a lot of those things. I hadn't been on something like Gotham, but I knew that the expectations were so sky high for it. It certainly wasn't like you're coming in as the underdog, Warner Brothers has put all the support into it. The marketing was massive. The amount of money they put behind it was huge. The expectation was there, so we did well, meeting expectations.
Ben McKenzie: There was a pause, somebody getting on the megaphone and everyone clapping for 10 seconds, and then, okay, now we're back to work.
Donal Logue: The numbers check was really quick… The goal was to build, was to keep hitting, to keep grinding it.
Robin Lord Taylor: Excitement and adrenaline… Everyone was so happy to be part of this thing. And then also, the thing that most people on the cast were responding to was the fact that we had such an amazing team of people together where ego wasn't an issue.The actors being respectful to everybody, and the director being respectful and being so excited to be part of this family, and that's really [what] carried the show. I mean, we were just excited to be in each other's company and to be creating this together. That's the feeling that I can remember so clearly.
John Stephens: It felt great. But it also felt like that thing where there's the audience who's tuning in because the show is great, and then there's the audience tuning in because it's a Batman show on Fox… And so you're kind of waiting to see, okay, how much is tuning in because of the show, and how much is tuning in because of Batman? It was exciting, but it was also kind of a wait and see.
Danny Cannon: I don't do ratings, so [I didn’t] care. I remember in the writers room, sometimes they would put reviews up on the wall and things like that. And I actually didn't care for that… You could drive yourself mad by second guessing and obsessing about box office, and shares and things… You're going to do a better job if you just tell a story and do the best you can.
David Mazouz: There definitely was talk about it. I mean, not necessarily about the ratings, but more about we all got excited and we wanted to watch [the premiere] together. We were obviously aware that it was airing. We weren't that deep at the filming that we were like, “oh, show’s on TV.” We knew what was happening, but as far as I remember, in terms of ratings, we were all excited that it had such a big opening. But I don't remember the conversation being any more thorough than that.
Ben McKenzie: [It] was a relief to come on that strong. And it was great to get the momentum that we had. Everything from that first screening at Comic-Con when people went, whoa, this is different. This is not what we're used to from network television and even from some of these “superhero shows.” This is a much more grounded series. One of the ironies that always stuck out to me is that, of course, and I know this is debated endlessly amongst the fans, but to my mind, it's not a superhero show, because none of the people in Gotham have superpowers. They're messed up psychologically, and they become villainous for their own reasons, and half their various ways are expressing their villainy, but they can't run through walls or read people's minds or whatever. We had the momentum when we came on that strong. It really gave us another gust to pump up our sails and push us out further.
As the season continued, the cast would gather on a weekly basis at Sean Pertwee’s apartment to watch the show live on Mondays, eat dinner, and live-tweet the episodes.
Sean Pertwee: We were really deep in filming, but something that we did do, I had a place in Brooklyn for a while, for half of the first season… We never got a chance to see [the episodes]. We were never given copies. We were never shown them. So what we started doing was I’d cook, and I'd invite people around.
David Mazouz: He'd have me and my mom over, and sometimes we'd get dinner before or after with the directors, too. We were all pretty tight. The cast was large, but everybody was very close. A lot of us had moved to New York for this experience, and so we didn't really have much of a life outside of the show. We were all really there for each other.
Robin Lord Taylor: We [didn’t] see each other working ever, and especially Sean and I, we rarely had scenes together. Besides the table read, it would stretch into an episode, and we just would have no idea how everybody was all working out. And then we would go to Sean’s and watch it together, and after everybody's seen it, collapsing and cheering and patting on the back, just so proud to see everybody bringing their A game.
David Mazouz: We would live tweet together. It was so cool because the show was airing once a week. And so for those 22 weeks when it was on the air, we all knew that we were going to be in front of our TV watching the show that we were on TV for… It was always a social opportunity.
Sean Pertwee: I think we were literally one of the first [shows] I was aware of ever [live-tweeting]… I thought I would be called up in front of the beak, and I thought I was going to get in a whole heap of trouble by the head of publicity at the Fox. And they said, “whatever you're doing, just carry on doing it.” Because it's quite early days for us to do that. But we would love doing that, getting together as a company… It’s that whole theater company vibe, and we'd watch it together when we got home. So it was eight o'clock on a Monday night, we'd hopefully get home in time, and I'd cook some food, and we'd all watch together.
Ben McKenzie: Shows always have a bit of a tricky time finding their footing initially, if they're this ambitious. But given the challenges that all shows face, we did a pretty solid job by the time we entered the second and third season. That's when I was able to get a little bit more involved in terms of writing and directing, and then being able to cast the episodes that I was directing. I would weigh in when it was appropriate, and when asked for my opinion. But I would give the credit there to both Bruno, Danny and then John Stephens, who served as a showrunner from second, third season on.
A month after the premiere, on October 13, 2014, Gotham was given a full series order for 22 episodes.
The first season finished filming on March 24, 2015. And ultimately, the show ran for five seasons, and 100 episodes. In fact, Gotham was so successful that by 2017, Warner Brothers started discussing possible spin-offs, or adjacent series. One of the ideas the team came up with ran for several seasons; the other did not.
Danny Cannon: Me and Bruno were at Ben McKenzie's wedding. I mean, that's an epic love story, Ben and Morenna [Bacarin]. They meet on the show. They have a kiss on the show. Sparks fly. It's so great. Nobody knew, both very private people. But there was a scene where he proposes to her at the Brooklyn [Botanical] Gardens, right? They [got] married at the Brooklyn gardens, the same spot where that scene was filmed. Everything about that relationship has been so romantic.
Anyway, we're at that wedding, and Bruno walks up to me and John and goes, “Warner Brothers wants another DC, okay?” And there were two ideas. John wrote Metropolis, which is a fucking brilliant script. And I was there helping him with that. It was basically Gotham, but it was Metropolis. It was like the yin and yang. It was like, Metropolis is the perfect city, and Gotham was the most imperfect city.
John Stephens: I feel like the initial idea might have come from Fox, not actually Warner Brothers. I think Fox might have floated the idea, and Warner Brothers got on board with it, and it went through multiple iterations, as these things always do, and we moved forward with it… Making a television show, when you're in the development stages, so frequently it's like you're trying to land a plane. You can see the runway, the plane's coming in, and all of a sudden, we're gonna crash. That's what Metropolis felt like. But it was too bad, because it was a really cool idea for a show.
Danny Cannon: Bruno had this idea about, he really wanted to go back to England, and he said to me, “Pennyworth, 1960s, comes out the war.” [It] was a lot of standing on the balcony smoking cigarettes, with Bruno kicking the Pennyworth idea around. And Bruno, once again, just had that character down and had his family down… I remember saying to Bruno “the problem I have as a DC show, I know you've got the [heroes], who are the villains?” And he goes, “one's from literature like Jack the Ripper. Dick Turpin, Jacqueline Hyde.” I was like, “fucking hell yes.”
John Stephens: [Metropolis] had no crossover with Gotham in the pilot. Maybe down the line, there could have been some sort of crossover, but there was no direct crossover. In the course of the pilot, it really featured Lois and Lex as the main characters. Geoff Johns had some really cool ideas about how the show should proceed in terms of a Breaking Bad of Lex, which was an awesome idea. I was really excited about doing in the same way… It's pulpy, it's comic, but it has a very realistic boots on the ground adult-ish feel. I was really excited to do that version of Metropolis. And I thought it would be cool if we actually got to do it at the end of the day. I never really know, to be honest, even after all these years, why Warner Brothers pulled the plug.
Danny Cannon: Metropolis didn't go because we kept saying Gotham without Batman works. It's everything around Batman. It creates the world where he will live, right? Metropolis, no Superman. What is Metropolis? Metropolis is the character. Lois Lane was the character, deciding to be a journalist. And there's this crazy fucking guy there who might be a genius called Lex. Fucking great things, right? It's good, but the minute we said “no Superman,” it was like “Nah.”
John Stephens: Superman was at the very end. It was going to launch [the DC Universe streaming service], and they were going to order it direct to series. At some point they had to sit down and write a $120 million check to do 10 episodes of this show, and I think they got cold feet. It wasn’t just a pilot, and someone else was picking up the pilot. Because they weren't selling it off to Fox and having Fox pay for it. At that point they were going to be on the hook for the entire price tag. Now, obviously, they have their own platform, they're used to it. But that platform did not exist.
While Metropolis never flew up, up and away, Pennyworth ran for three seasons, first on Epix and then moving to what was at the time called HBO Max, now called Max. However, despite fans wanting to create a connection between Gotham and Pennyworth, the two shows were very separate worlds.
Bruno Heller: The thing with canon… [It’s] a misapprehension of how this world works. It's much more like mythology that in all stories of the gods, there are contradictions, or even in the Bible, there's contradictions. All the things that happened to these people can't have all happened.
Danny Cannon: Bruno would like to say no, but the beginning of Pennyworth… He could have turned into Sean, because the whole point of him coming to America was to look after somebody's child. His friend, Thomas Wayne, had a child, and his best friend was Alfred. I had a lot of ideas about that. But Bruno would rather say “no, they're all just different things.”
John Stephens: We didn't do anything in there that would make it not be canon to Gotham. I don't think we crossed any wires where, if you ever wanted to hook it up, you could hook it up in a different way. But we never, at least during my time on the show, we never thought of it as going right into Gotham. We thought of it as existing in its own particular alt universe.
Bruno Heller: Pennyworth was a prequel to V for Vendetta… I've immense respect for Alan Moore, [but] I didn't want to do anything as bleak and Orwellian as V for Vendetta. The notion of a genuine timeline, it gives you a little bit of discipline in how you build In the story and how wide you can expand the universe or not.
Danny Cannon: And that's the great thing about the DC Universe. You think of Chris Nolan's genius, and now Todd Phillips genius, and you think about Tim Burton, how he brought it all back to life. They're all different, but they're all good, and the material is so good that it always works.
Bruno Heller: The knock on Pennyworth would be, it's the difference between Gotham and London. Gotham is a much bigger and more believable fantasy world. It's tough to do fantasy in London, because London is too real.
As the show continued over five seasons,
John Stephens was getting pressure from above to include more “superhero” aspects in the series.
John Stephens: Some of our ratings really [started] trending down a little bit over time, as many shows do. So when that starts to happen, you start to say, well, what can we do? And if you're doing a superhero show or show that takes place in the comic book world, the obvious move is to bring in more superheroes. But on this show, on Gotham, it was less superheroes and more Bat-mythology. Can we bring in more of his villains? Which to me, I never had a problem with because he has the best villains, and I always felt like we could do spins on them that made them Gotham-ized, that made them feel like they belonged in the world of our show, and didn't feel like they were just being shoehorned in. So there was definitely some pressure to be saying, “Can we bring in more Bat mythology?” And there's always a case of like, okay, how can we do this in a way that fits into the fabric of world?
One key aspect of Gotham mythology that never came to the show, or at least not exactly, was The Joker - despite the pressure mentioned above. The closest the show came was the lauded “Proto-Joker” Jerome, played by Cameron Monaghan.
John Stephens: There are a lot of different voices, and different elements involved, and they had different agendas. Different people wanted different things with different properties. And yeah, there were certain things that were off limits, like The Joker. And so we did a lot of work arounds with Jerome and his brother in order to make a kind of Joker predecessor, or Joker-ish type character. It wasn't always a coherent strategy. I would say.
After five seasons and 100 episodes, Gotham came to an end on April 25, 2019.
John Stephens: It was a tricky episode to write, because you had to bring Batman into that episode. The whole point of the show was that Gotham had gotten to a point where it needed Batman to step in and help save it. And that the idea being that if there had been no Jim Gordon doing what he was doing, there was going to be no Batman.
So making all those strands meet in one episode, and summing up, was actually super difficult. Doing the time jump in the middle of the episode and having it be smooth was also going to be difficult. Building out an actual story that was going to be engaging in one episode, that was easy, but also you wanted to hit certain keynote things, like finally giving Jim a mustache, even if it's only for one scene. It was more like a jigsaw puzzle than probably any other episode that I wrote because you're just trying to fit all the pieces together.
While the majority of the cast came back for the end, due to a 10 year time jump in Episode 100, Camren Bicondova chose not to return for the finale.
Camren Bicondova: I don't regret it at all. Early on in season five, I was told I wasn't going to be in it, and then I had made plans to move across the country. And then after those plans were made, the minds were changed, I really had to think and pray on it. I had given all of me to her at that point, and this chapter was closing, and I still don't regret it.
John Stephens: It was Camren’s idea. She really didn't feel comfortable playing herself as a 28 year old, which I totally respect. And luckily, we found an actress who, weirdly enough, looks a lot like Camren. I couldn't believe it. I knew of [Lili Simmons] because I'd seen Bone Tomahawk. So I knew of her, and she seemed like an obvious choice in many ways. When she was available to come in and she'd talk to Camren, it actually worked out very well.
Camren Bicondova: Lili did a great job. The fact that I could even give that torch away, per se, and give someone else the opportunity to play her… Some people might not agree with it, but I don't regret it one bit. I was able to spend time with her. We spent hours in her hotel room. I shared journal entries that I wrote as Selena. I showed her scenes that were crucial for her, for her growth as Selena. Maybe Warner Brothers didn't even agree. I don't know, but I don't regret it. I think what happened was supposed to happen, and I have to stand by my choices and I'm grateful that I gave her my all. And because of that, I don't regret it, because I know that I gave everything.
Also in the final episode, Bruce Wayne finally put on the batsuit – but given the needs of the shot itself, as well as limited access to batsuits, David Mazouz’s face was CGI-ed onto a stuntman.
David Mazouz: When John Stephens called me, I was at school, in my physical school in LA. I was at lunch, and I remember I was walking around the parking lot, and he told me, “All right, so we're going to end the show with you wearing the bat suit,” and you're gonna say, “I'm Batman.” I'm kidding. I never said that. But everybody had been asking me about that for so many years. So it wasn't like it was a shock. It felt, “Wow, we're really doing that. We're really going there,” It was the very end. So it also felt bittersweet.
John Stephens: The CGI face, the whole amalgamated Batman, [it took] a lot of us just to figure out how to do it. We wanted it to be someone who was six foot four, that was part of it, and who weighed, 240 pounds or 230 pounds. But also we had to be David’s face. So we looked at ways to age up his face, it was really, “how do we do this? How do we thread this needle?”
David Mazouz: There was a stunt double in the actual Batsuit, but it's my face in the Batsuit that they CGI in. I never wore it, but they did a 3D mask with my face for that scene. They filmed like it was me acting, and they replaced his face.
John Stephens: You know, I haven't gone back to rewatch it, literally, since I watched it on air… The frustrating thing was, we couldn't use any of the other suits. There were all these suits out there. I feel like some other TV shows had made use of some of the suits from the movies, [but] they were all off limits to us, so we had to build our own suit. And those suits are incredibly expensive. So that was very frustrating, but [costume designer] John Glaser did a great job. It would have been easier if [we had] been able to modify an existing suit rather than having to build it from scratch.
David Mazouz: They were really protective with the suit. It was only in that one scene, but it cost... I know it cost a lot of money, and they locked it away. The first time I saw it in person was at the San Diego Museum. They had a Batman exhibit, with a bunch of suits, and my Batsuit was next to all the other Batsuits.
Looking back now, the cast and crew truly believes the journey was worth the friends they made along the way.
Bruno Heller: Legacy for me is, it's just happy memories and friends that I made… There's no point in making a show at all if it's not a happy show. I could name shows— very, very successful shows that everyone has walked away with with a bitter taste in their mouth and didn't enjoy making. But they made money and and they made a career out of it, so fine, but to me, the legacy of a show is, did people enjoy doing it, and did they walk away feeling like they were treated well and they had a good time, and that they've made friends with people and they feel proud?
Robin Lord Taylor: What we had was not normal, especially shows of that caliber and that magnitude. To have everybody be so celebratory of that project all the time and of each other… Unfortunately, it's not the norm. I remember specifically Danny, when we were chatting, pointed to everybody, “this is not the usual situation.”
Sean Pertwee: It sounds like a sort of cliché, and you've heard that a million times before from other groups of actors and performers, saying, “Oh, we had the most wonderful time.” But we were incredibly tight over those five and a bit years. There was a lot of life and a lot of death and a lot of love for marriages and babies and everything happened in that period. I still am in contact with them all. I saw Robin the other day. He's one of my dearest friends. And Cory and I speak, he sends me filthy memes. When I come back to Manhattan, I try and get hold of anyone who's around. I saw David the other day. So it was a very important chunk of our lives, those five years.
Danny Cannon: What was great about Gotham is our feet were on the ground. We didn't have to do costumes too much. We didn't have to do superheroes. Batman's a very grounded superhero because he's not supernatural, and he doesn't have supernatural abilities… He is literally a feet on the ground guy who wants to avenge his family by stopping criminals. And he does that by training himself, by being hard on himself. I'm working really hard, and I was like, I identify with that.
Bruno Heller: It's a tiny part of a massive Batman mythology. I just hope we did justice to that culture, in that world, because it means a lot to people. If any part of pop culture is sacred, then Batman is a kind of secular saint, and this is a religion, so I hope we took it seriously enough to honor that, and took it with enough lightness to make it work as a TV show.
John Stephens: I got to know and work with a lot of different great people. I've worked with, and I've continued to work with Bruno and Danny again, which is fabulous. And they're part of my life.
Danny Cannon: I do miss going into John's office every day, and I'm still really embarrassed that I brought my puppy to work and he pooped in John's office.
Ben McKenzie: I like to think the legacy is to bring the depth of viewer experience that you might get from the feature film versions of Batman to this, “small screen.” Without Gotham, I don't know that they would be making a show about The Penguin, which is a testament to both Robin's portrayal, but also to showing that you can do this, that you can make what's essentially, at least PG-13, if not R-rated show on network television by not dumbing it down to the audience, by keeping the plot lines intricate, the characters three dimensional. So I'd like to think that we pushed the ball forward there. I think we were quite different from a lot of the other DC shows that existed then and that exist now. No discredit to them, just saying, it's a different kind of thing.
Donal Logue: I was driving to Prince Rupert British Columbia to do a movie, and I have my pickup truck and my Lance camper in the back, and it's up near the Alaskan border. And I got a speeding ticket. I was going through a town that was kind of a speed trap, and I got pulled over by this Canadian cop who was pissed off. And I said, “Man, I'm really sorry. You know, kilometers per hour,” I tried to do this little shuck and jive. We're in the middle of nowhere. And he's like, are “Were you Harvey Bullock?” And he goes, “Man, I got transferred out here from Quebec, and my wife, we're living out in the hinterlands, and Gotham is the thing that we watch every night.” And I'm like, “Dude, I have a Gotham baseball hat for you in the back of my camper, if you just let me roll on this one.”
Sean Pertwee: I think that people will look back at Gotham and say: they were right. There are so many elements to Gotham that are correct. That it's not upset the apple cart. It's definitely created a reset. The reason why Batman has been successful and so popular generationally, every 10 years, there's an iteration of Batman that becomes prevalent, that becomes important to that generation. Adam West's Batman was, when my father was on Broadway doing a show, when I was about three or four. And I specifically remember dancing around the kitchen, jumping around the kitchen, my mum's apron on, diving around to the Batman music, and my dad… I've got pictures of me and my dad watching Batman. Now, Batman, in those days, may have been camp to adults, but it wasn't camp to us. It was super cool. Batman and the canon has this way of morphing into poignancy for that generation.
What we did was we humanized the whole DC idea of it, not where does it end with Marvel like laser beams coming out your ear holes and flying around the world 59 times and reversing them. It was steeped in reality… It actually humanized the craziness that happens in the whole of the Batman universe. It gave people a touchstone of reality in many respects, which I think was applicable at the time, and I think that it still is. It has changed, and will continue to change with the forthcoming iterations of the Batman universe, because people will take into consideration their pasts, why they became those people. It was touched upon in the books, but it was humanized and visualized in our show.
Camren Bicondova: Gotham brought an edge to comic book stories that other shows weren't doing at the time. And I don't really think that shows are doing it now… And the quality of the work, we were making 45 minute movies. It was storytelling at its finest. The standard that Danny and Bruno and then [John Stephens] set was… classy, it was elegant, it was dark, it was edgy, it was gruesome in some ways, but I just think it checks all the boxes.
Robin Lord Taylor: I don't know if they could ever make a show like [Gotham] anymore. You know, 22 episode, big budget superhero show on network television just doesn't really sound like a thing that's coming back anytime soon. So just the sheer magnitude of that production, I think, is exemplary of its time. It was exemplary of those last big shows before the industry fell apart… [And] in terms of the fans and the fandom, we showed we were able to play with canon and to play with these classic storylines in a way that was brave in many ways and also unexpected by many fans, but I think ultimately will prove to be just an endlessly refreshing take on these stories that have been around for 80 years. To take these stories that have been around for so long and to reframe them, to retell them, and to bring you aspects to the character that you weren't expecting before. It's just going to stand out in people's minds, and especially in terms of the rest of the Batman universe.
Ben McKenzie: The pressure was so intense that the first thing that I was conscious of was not failing. And I think we all were, so once we jumped over that, through that hoop, and we’d gotten the gold star, the subsequent seasons became more of an exploration of, okay, well, what can we do with this? Now that we've built the car, where can we take it? How fast can it go? What can we do here? And that became fun, it became interesting, and I grew so much as a performer, but also as a creative person in show business. When I entered [the show] I hadn't written or directed. By the end of that, I'd seen the process through over 100 episodes, and seen it from beginning to end. And I left thinking, if I want to do this again —which I haven't yet, but I'm thinking about doing again and being on a series again—If I do this again, I know how to do it, and I knew how to do it in a different way. So, very grateful for that.
Sean Pertwee: It really humbled me. What happens in our profession, it’s so fleeting. You do a job and then you move on. I used to be terrified of being committed to anything for more than a year. The idea of coming over to America and having to sign your life away for seven years. Sign your life away sounds so dramatic, but for a show that you may not necessarily enjoy being in, or something like that, it was a huge departure for that. But the whole experience for me, I have nothing but fond memories. It was humbling because it made me realize that very rarely in one's career do you enjoy a job so much. People have asked me in the past, what have been your most favorite jobs and this, in all honesty, without doubt, is it. We spent five years together, five years in each other's pockets, and genuinely cared for each other, genuinely cared about the art, genuinely cared for our crew, genuinely cared for what we were doing in our fans. We got to meet our fans who supported us, and we became a family.
Camren Bicondova: It changed my life. I went through a lot of hard times personally during it, but I wouldn't change any of it. It changed how I approach my work. It changed how I look for jobs. It changed my life in so many ways and for the better… People don't get to be part of things like that? It's not normal. I just am forever humbled and honored.. I'm forever grateful.
Robin Lord Taylor: It's the best job I've ever had. It's the best creative experience I've ever had. And I feel like I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to get back to something like that.
Ben McKenzie: On a personal level, I met my wife, and we have three beautiful children, and it's changed my life. I live in Brooklyn instead of Los Angeles, and I am just incredibly happy in my life. I give a lot of credit to Gotham for that, and to Bruno, who said, “Hey, we've got this actress Morena, who I think would be great, she should come on the show.” And I said, “Who?” So I give him a lot of credit for that.
Donal Logue: I can't watch Gotham just from a purely creative standpoint, because I know too much about the lives of everybody in it. I'm too close with everybody. Ben and Morena fall in love, you know? And then we got to marry them, in the GCPD, but I'd been to their real wedding in Prospect Park, and it was a phenomenal night.
David Mazouz: Gotham came at a pretty transformative time. I mean, Gotham was literally my formative years. I was on it my teenage years, almost all of them, 13 to 18. And it shaped who I am. It shaped a lot about my worldview. it put me in a position in the industry that I wasn't at before. It exposed me to so much, to so many different kinds of people, to what it's like to be in a very adult situation, working every day. It taught me a lot about my craft. It's something most people, especially at that age, can only dream of who are actors. It opened a lot of doors for me, not only opportunity wise, which it did, but it also got me in a lot of situations where I learned a lot about the world. Going to Comic-Con and being backstage, and seeing how that stuff worked… It's tough to quantify. Even though it's been a few years, I still feel too close to it to really know what effect it's had. But there's no question that it made me who I am. How could it not? The second half of my childhood was Gotham.
Camren Bicondova: I'm constantly reminded of what a blessing Gotham is and was to me, and I get to see it every day… In 20 years, I'm still going to be talking about it. I'm going to be that annoying person that's like, yeah, when I was 13, I was on the show, and normally people are like, shut up. No one cares. But no, that show changed my life. I will continue talking about it forever.
These interviews have been edited for content and length.
via 'Nobody Could Do Gotham': An Oral History of the Fox Show That Reinvented Batman
by Amelia Emberwing
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