In 2011, McKenzie got the chance to voice an animated Bruce Wayne in Batman: Year One, and three years later, he’s playing a young James Gordon in Fox’s upcoming series, Gotham. And despite the fact that Gotham is a prequel and therefore telling a new story, McKenzie is very aware of the “high bar” that exists for his character. But thankfully, McKenzie wasn’t asked to do what Gary Oldman did in Christopher Nolan’s films or what Bryan Cranston did in Year One. Instead, when McKenzie went to lunch with DC Comics chief creative officer Geoff Johns, they talked about McKenzie’s responsibility to the character, part of which was making Gordon “fresh.” So the next question was: How does one do that?
“The way that they talked about it with me is that Gotham is on this knife’s edge and it’s going to fall apart,” McKenzie tells EW. “It’s falling apart because society in general is falling apart. Society’s fallen so much that everybody feels as though they must participate in the morally collapsed society. All the cops are on the take; the judges are on the take; everybody is a part of this thing. And so James, who grew up in the city but then left when his father died, comes at it from the tried-and-true device but [with] fresh eyes. He served overseas; he was in a war. And he comes back and he’s got a real moral rigidity to him, which is tested immediately and tested deeply.”
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