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One near-constant in the Christopher Nolan Batman movies is that he doesn’t spend much time detailing the origins of the villains in each film. (Two-face being an exception, as his origin is woven into The Dark Knight.) The Dark Knight Rises goes into a bit more detail than the two movies that precede it, as it gives us some hint about how the characters that exist at the beginning of the film got to be who they are. But in reality, there’s really not much backstory for Tom Hardy‘s villain Bane.
That’s not how it always was. In a recent interiview, the film’s costume designer tells of a Bane sequence that would have provided a look into the character’s early days. Naturally, spoilers follow for The Dark Knight Rises.
In a conversation with GQ, costume designer Lindy Hemming dropped a big bit of info about a scene we didn’t see:
The thing that you should have seen during that sequence is [Bane] being injured in his youth. So one of the fundamental things about his costume is that he has this scar from the back injury. Even if he hasn’t got the bulletproof vest on, he still has to wear the waist belt and the braces. In that scene in the prison, where he’s learning to fight the same way Batman learned to fight, he’s wearing an early version of his waist belt. It’s showing support, but it’s not the finished one he eventually wears. He’s also wearing an early version of his gas mask, all glued together … If you look at the film, unless they’ve cut it—and I’m sure they haven’t—there’s a whole early section for Tom Hardy where he’s fighting and being taunted by people. He’s got chains on him, and he’s standing on a wooden thing while people are attacking him. And in that scene, he’s wearing a much more ragged, primitive version of the mask.
When told that the scene isn’t actually in the finished film, Hemming added,
Well that’s an awful shame, but I suppose you have to cut things. I won’t elaborate on it too much, because it isn’t in the film, but there was another section that showed you why he had the mask and where it came from.
Given the way The Dark Knight Rises is structured, with the misdirection about the identity of the child who escaped the prison, there’s really little room for detailed “origin” scenes for Bane. They’d have to come way late in the game, or would contradict the mystery that Nolan & Co. spend the movie building about the child’s prison escape. And do we really need to see the bits described above? Yeah, they’d be cool, especially as a way to give Bane more character, and more time without the domination of the mask. But things being what they are, it’s easy to see why these scenes didn’t make the final cut.
And on the subject of Bane, here are a couple images of designs for the character’s back scars posted by artist Sebastian Lochmann, via CBM. This is one more thing we might have seen for the character — much more significant wounds from his early years in the prison.
