Alicia Silverstone Turned Down ‘Batman & Robin’ Multiple Times Because Batgirl Originally Written As “Just A Sex Object”
Though she would ultimately accept the chance to fight alongside the dynamic duo, Batman & Robin star Alicia Silverstone has revealed that she initially had no interest in playing Batgirl because the original script treated the character as nothing more than “a sex object”.
The first actress to ever portray the heroine on the silver screen (and the second overall after Yvonne Craig in the 1960s Batman TV series), Silverstone offered this recollection regarding her brief stint as The Caped Crusader’s sidekick during a recent career retrospective interview given to Entertainment Weekly‘s Patrick Gomez.
Reflecting on some of her more notable roles including Cher Horowitz in Clueless and Darian Forrester in The Crush (later changed to Adrian due to legal action from the character’s real life inspiration), the actress eventually came to her 1997 visit to Gotham City, the mention of which she met with the revelation that despite having been the only actress pursued for the role, she actually rejected the opportunity to play Batgirl multiple times due her feeling that the script was mistreating the character:
“They kept asking me to do it, and the script was interesting, but the character just felt like an object, so I kept saying no.
“And then they were like, ‘Well, what is it that you want it to be?’ And so I started talking about how to have her be a human, and more interesting things for me to do so I’m not just a sex object. I don’t know why I knew that, or how I knew that, but that seemed obvious to me at that time.”
“When it came out, I don’t think people liked it very much – but later on, people told me it’s their favorite movie. It’s very camp.”
While both Batman & Robin and Silverstone’s Batgirl would be ultimately find a cult-following, the actress would first have to endure a veritable outpouring of fan-bashing and vitriol – to the extent that she pointedly told The Guardian in 2020 that her time in the cowl “definitely wasn’t my favourite film-making experience”:
“They would make fun of my body when I was younger. It was hurtful but I knew they were wrong. I wasn’t confused. I knew that it was not right to make fun of someone’s body shape, that doesn’t seem like the right thing to be doing to a human.
“There were working circumstances that were less than favourable in terms of how things went down. And no, I didn’t say ‘f–k you’ and come out like a warrior but I would just walk away and go, OK I know what that is and I’m done, I’m not going near that again.”
