Kevin Conroy #3540

#3540 By 1992, Tim Burton had brought Batman back to life. His first two movies were effective, and Warner Bros. wanted, badly, to leverage demand with Batman: The Animated Series, which originally aired in primetime on Fox, paid for with twice the typical budget for an animated show of its kind. This was a darker and more grownup Batman. And the studio needed a voice for him.

A year earlier, Kevin Conroy, a Juilliard-trained Broadway actor, was about to audition — reluctantly — for the role. He was no comic geek, having been raised in a strict, traditional Irish-Catholic family outside New York City, where recreational activities were more likely to include baseball and jigging with his Gaelic-speaking Grandma. Producers gave him a crash-course in the Batman storyline before having him read the script. "As soon as they described his schizophrenic lifestyle, it bugged me,"Conroy says. "I thought, Wait a minute, he is the Bill Gates of Gotham. He is the most eligible bachelor. Everyone knows who he is. And he puts on a cape, and no one recognizes him? Come on." In the five minutes he had to prepare, Conroy decided to give the superhero a new dual-voiced reading — the naïve scion's lilt and his alter-ego's deep growl — fundamentally altering the legacy of a comic book he had only passing knowledge of. Now imagine if Bruce Wayne and Batman had exactly the same speaking voice. It seems wrong. For that, the world has Kevin Conroy to thank.