And you won't believe who could have played him. The Dark Knight Rises Could Have Included The Riddler

The minute The Dark Knight opened in 2008 to the kind of
critical acclaim and box office that almost never happens, everyone
started talking about the sequel-- and the loudest ones were probably
the executives at Warner Bros., who were surely eager to keep the money
train rolling. But there's a big difference between what happens when we
all talk amongst ourselves about the villains we'd like to see in a
movie and when the WB execs do it-- namely that when the executives
start talking, someone has to listen to them, no matter how crazy their
ideas were.



So, as screenwriter David S. Goyer remembers it, it was as early as the premiere of The Dark Knight when the WB execs started throwing around their crazy ideas. As he revealed in the print edition of Empire magazine (via Batman-News), they had one very specific casting idea in mind:

“it’s gonna be The Riddler, and we want it to be Leonardo DiCaprio…”.

We heard about a million different rumors about the Riddler showing up in The Dark Knight Rises-- or Batman 3, as we called it at the time-- including a really pervasive one
that Eddie Murphy would be playing him. But we had never seen
DiCaprio's name attached to it, maybe because Christopher Nolan recoiled
in horror at the very idea, and that got the Warner Bros. brass to shut
up in the name of keeping their talent happy.



At least it's fun to know that Goyer was dealing with the same kind of
rumors, and these from the guys who had the power to make them actually
come true. So far as we know there won't be the slightest hint of the
Riddler in The Dark Knight Rises, but I guess there's really no way of knowing for sure until the movie finally comes out on July 20 this year.