Anne Hathaway spent an entire week preparing to audition for Harley Quinn before her meeting with Christopher Nolan for The Dark Knight Rises — only to find out two hours into their conversation that the role on the table was Catwoman. Hathaway revealed the story in a new interview published by Variety, offering the clearest account yet of how she landed one of the most talked-about superhero performances of the 2010s.
The non-obvious detail that makes this story land: Nolan never told Hathaway which character she was being considered for before the meeting. She made an educated guess — Harley Quinn — and threw herself into a full week of preparation based entirely on that assumption.
A Week of Work for the Wrong Character
Hathaway told Variety that she researched and developed her take on Harley Quinn in the days leading up to her sit-down with Nolan. By the time she walked into the room, she was ready to pitch her vision for the chaotic, anarchic villain — not the sleek, morally ambiguous thief who would actually become her defining role.
Two hours passed before Nolan revealed he wanted to discuss Catwoman, also known as Selina Kyle. That means Hathaway spent the first stretch of their meeting either talking around the subject or simply waiting for the director to get to the point. The detail underscores how tightly Nolan guarded information about The Dark Knight Rises during production — a level of secrecy that apparently extended to the actors he was actively courting.
Hathaway’s Catwoman ultimately appeared alongside Christian Bale’s Batman in the 2012 film, drawing wide praise for threading a difficult needle: the character needed to feel dangerous without tipping into outright villainy, and sympathetic without becoming soft. The performance held up well enough that debate about a Selina Kyle solo project has never fully gone away.
Nolan’s Secrecy Shaped the Entire Dark Knight Trilogy
Nolan’s reputation for information control on set is well documented, but Hathaway’s account adds a specific, almost comic texture to it. Keeping a prospective lead actress guessing about her own potential character for two hours in a one-on-one meeting is a different order of secrecy than simply refusing to share a script with the press.
The Dark Knight Rises casting process was famously opaque. Tom Hardy’s role as Bane and Marion Cotillard’s involvement were both subjects of sustained speculation before the film opened. Hathaway’s own casting was announced without the character name initially attached, which, in retrospect, fits the same pattern Nolan apparently applied in the room itself.
It also raises a question worth sitting with: what would Hathaway’s Harley Quinn have looked like? Margot Robbie’s version of the character — introduced in 2016’s Suicide Squad and later expanded in Birds of Prey — became the definitive screen take. But Hathaway was clearly thinking seriously about the role years before Robbie made it her own.
Why the Harley Quinn Mix-Up Still Resonates in 2026
DC’s cinematic landscape has shifted dramatically since 2012. James Gunn’s rebooted DC Studios universe is now in full swing, and the question of which characters belong to which actors feels more fluid than ever. Hathaway’s story is a reminder of how different things looked when Nolan’s grounded, self-contained Gotham was the only major Batman universe on screen.
At the time of The Dark Knight Rises, Harley Quinn had never appeared in a live-action film. The assumption that Nolan might introduce her wasn’t unreasonable — she was one of the most requested Batman-adjacent characters among fans — so Hathaway’s logic was sound. She just happened to be preparing for a role that Nolan had no intention of putting in his film.
For anyone tracking the evolution of superhero casting, the story also illustrates how much has changed in terms of actor-director communication. Today, major roles at Marvel and DC are typically locked down with NDAs and carefully managed briefings. The idea of a director leaving a lead actress to guess her own character for a week feels almost quaint by 2026 standards — and very specifically Nolan.
Hathaway has remained active and selective since The Dark Knight Rises, with recent projects that have kept her in awards conversation. Whether she ever returns to comic-book territory is an open question, but franchise nostalgia is clearly having a moment in 2026, and stories like this one feed directly into it.
The Variety interview doesn’t indicate Hathaway regrets the Harley Quinn prep — if anything, she seems to tell the story with affection for the absurdity of it. The more concrete takeaway is that her week of misdirected work didn’t hurt her: Nolan cast her anyway, and the performance became the part of The Dark Knight Rises audiences most often revisit.
Nolan’s next film is currently in production, and casting announcements are expected later this year — which means the secrecy will almost certainly start all over again.
