Batman: Caped Crusader has done such a thorough job of keeping the identities of the actors who voice its new heroes and villains under wraps that the performers themselves sometimes didn’t even know who their costars were. “I have a question for you. Who plays Bruce?” says Jamie Chung (Lovecraft Country and Stone Cold Fox), after discussing her ominous new version of Harley Quinn. “I feel like you have more information than I do.”

The actors recorded their lines separately, in part because that early part of the production process for the Amazon Prime show (debuting August 1) took place at the end of the pandemic lockdowns. Although they’ve all seen the finished episodes, no one knows who plays whom. Vanity Fair is clearing the smoke bomb for the exclusive reveal.

Here’s the answer to Chung’s question: Hamish Linklater, the terrifying priest from Midnight Mass, Abraham Lincoln in the recent Manhunt series, and one of the doom-predicting traders from The Big Short, will play the new Bruce Wayne and Batman—a fact he had difficulty keeping secret, at least from his children. “I never in a million bajillion years imagined that I would actually get the part. Not only had I never been cast to do voiceover work before this, but also—it’s Batman! You don’t go from zero to Mount Olympus,” Linklater says. “Then I got the call and I screamed so loud. I just ran and grabbed my kids and was just like, ‘Dad’s Batman!’”

Even now, most of the supporting-character voices remain cloaked, but two other major figures can be revealed: Christina Ricci (Yellowjackets and The Lizzie Borden Chronicles) will voice jewel thief Catwoman and her socialite alter ego Selina Kyle, while Diedrich Bader (The Drew Carey Show and Better Things) will take on the smarmy and corrupt Gotham City district attorney Harvey Dent, who becomes the double-crossing villain Two-Face.

Chung’s performance as Harley Quinn is a radical departure from the madcap Brooklyn accent typically associated with the character (who will soon be played by Lady Gaga in this fall’s live-action sequel Joker: Folie à Deux). Batman: Caped Crusader significantly reimagines her villainous origin story as well. Chung’s Dr. Harleen Quinzel is still a psychiatrist, but one who chooses wrongdoing on her own rather than being driven insane by The Joker, who is not a presence in her life (at least, not yet). If anything, this version of Harley Quinn as a self-appointed vigilante has more in common with Batman himself, since her crime spree involves capturing and manipulating the wealthiest citizens of Gotham.

“You have the psychiatrist that is really bubbly, and seems like she really cares about her clients, but she’s kind of like a Robin Hood. She treats some of the elites in Gotham, but she takes it upon herself to bring justice in her own way,” says Chung, who changes gears when she voices the doctor’s masked Harley Quinn persona. “It’s kind of creepy. They really wanted [Harley Quinn] to be very menacing—a bit more quiet and calculating. In a weird way, she’s like a dominatrix. You’re in all this pain and yet she’s telling you what to do, and ‘You’ve been a bad boy…’”

That’s one of the signs that Batman: Caped Crusader, which is executive produced by J.J. Abrams and The Batman filmmaker Matt Reeves, is aimed at an audience beyond little kids.

Batman: Caped Crusader hits on a number of nostalgia points. First, the 10-episode animated series draws its look from the original 1939 illustrations that introduced the DC Comics character. Secondly, it’s overseen by two showrunners and executive producers who have a legacy of beloved Batman cartoons. Bruce Timm is renowned for his work on 1992–1995’s now classic Batman: The Animated Series, while James Tucker helped make the 2008–2011 animated show Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Both worked on several other DC projects, and they previously teamed up on the 1999–2001 futuristic series Batman Beyond, about an aging Bruce Wayne handing the night-stalking duties to a new protégé.

Why come back to the Batcave for another tour of duty? Both Timm and Tucker say they wanted to tell a more sophisticated Batman story in animation this time. “I’m a huge film noir fan, and that’s pretty much what we do exclusively in this,” Tucker says. “It’s such a period piece. I mean, I’ve done all kinds of Batman. I’ve worked on shows with different takes on Batman. No one has quite done this one for animation yet.”

Timm also saw a chance to go darker than he had before. “There were certain things that I had in my mind back in the early ’90s for the original Batman: The Animated Series that I didn’t get to do,” Timm says. “I wanted to do this emotionally messed-up version of Batman, who’s extremely aloof and almost inhuman.”

That’s what Linklater brought to the crime fighter, giving him a detached, predatory feel while also paying homage to the late voice actor who played Batman in that earlier show and countless others over the decades. “I think it’s actually off my memory of Kevin Conroy’s voice,” Linklater says. “When I actually rewatched the shows, I realized that it was different, but I had him in my head.”

Timm says Linklater got the role because of his take on Bruce Wayne. “We had a lot of people who were pretty good Batmans, but almost no good Bruces,” he says.

Linklater followed Timm’s guidance to think of Batman as the core of the character, and his rich, public face as a front. “Bruce Wayne is the mask. He’s the secret identity. He’s the invention. Batman is the actual character, the actual guy,” Linklater says. “It’s set in the ’40s, [so I just thought of] how Batman would try to play himself off as a playboy socialite. I think I just tried to swing and swing and swing until I made contact with something.”

Timm describes Bruce Wayne as “a persona that Batman himself has cultivated to throw people off of his scent. Deep down inside, he’s not a fun guy. He’s not charming, he’s not sexy, or anything like that. He’s devoted to warring on crime 24/7,” he says. “Hamish was really the only one who nailed exactly what we were going for.”

Adds Tucker, “There was a quirkiness we were hoping to hear beneath the surface of Bruce Wayne, where you could sense something was slightly off, but not so overt that it was weird.”

While the new show is not R-rated or especially violent or sexual (unlike the ultra-raunchy and savage Harley Quinn animated series on Max), it is a bit more sinister and complex, targeting grown-up fans of the DC Comics character. Batman fans come in all ages, and although Caped Crusader may have the bright, clear lines of an after-school cartoon, its stories are surprisingly sophisticated. “We are aiming this show at the same age group that watches Harry Potter movies or Marvel movies,” says Timm. There are actual murders to solve, the hero himself is damaged and self-destructive, and the characters sometimes fall for each other in ways beyond plummeting from high buildings.

Among those romances is a new take on the toxic Batman-versus-Catwoman relationship. “I wouldn’t call what they have romantic, per se. It’s more chemical,” Tucker says. “There’s pheromones involved.”

Ricci’s performance is a throwback to the femme fatales of the film noir era, with a bit of the brassy self-determination of the screwball comedy characters played by Carole Lombard. “There’s something going on there and he doesn’t really know how to deal with it,” Timm says. “Our Batman is closed off emotionally, all the way down to the ground. We jokingly kept saying throughout the show that he makes Mr. Spock look like the life of the party. As much as he tries to tamp down all of his emotions, [Catwoman] throws him off. He becomes obsessed with catching her and putting her away in prison just so he can kind of stop thinking about her.”

Ricci got the part because of her ability to merge the playful and sinister in recent roles like her offbeat and unstable Misty in Yellowjackets, as well as her work decades ago as Wednesday Addams in the Addams Family movies. “She is so versatile. I mean, she can go dark, serious, and adult. She can also go youthful and wacky,” Timm says. “We wanted [Selina Kyle] to be not too dark and serious, as most Catwomans have been for the last 20 years or so. We wanted her to be…not ditzy, but just not serious.”

“Flighty,” Tucker adds.

“Flighty is a good word,” Timm says.

Harleen Quinzel has a more normal romantic relationship with the Gotham City detective Renee Montoya, which tempers her more vicious leanings as Harley Quinn. Montoya is a by-the-book honest cop, who doesn’t know her girlfriend’s secret underworld life, and her integrity is the one thing that gives Harley Quinn pause about her actions. However, she also doesn’t see Montoya and law enforcement in general as effective tools for dealing with the wrongdoers she’s uncovered. “The idea of putting them together was something that seemed kind of natural,” Timm says. “We figured, as a psychiatrist, her clientele are some of the richest, most powerful men in Gotham City, and they dump all of their crap on her. It’s driving her crazy. She hears all this stuff, but because of psychiatrist-client privilege, she can’t do anything about it. She can’t tell anybody. We figured some of these guys have probably confessed some really horrible things to her, and she’s just like, ‘Well, I can’t just turn this guy loose out on the streets, but I can’t turn him into the cops either.’”

There's a long list of other actors lending their voices to Batman: Caped Crusader include Minnie Driver, Eric Morgan Stuart, Michelle C. Bonilla, Krystal Joy Brown, John DiMaggio, Mckenna Grace, Jason Watkins, Paul Scheer, Reid Scott, Gary Anthony Williams, Dan Donohue, David Krumholtz, Haley Joel Osment, and Toby Stephens—although their characters aren’t being revealed just yet.

Bader is the last piece of the voice-acting puzzle the producers are unveiling now. He has a long DC Comics history, having voiced the title character in both Tucker’s Batman: The Brave and the Bold and the adults-only Harley Quinn series, but now plays the district attorney Harvey Dent, who ultimately becomes Two-Face. “When we started the show, I’m like, ‘Well, he’s my Batman. I can’t…’” Tucker says. “At first it was hard for me, and by the end, now I hear him and I immediately think of Harvey. I don’t think of my Batman anymore. He did some nuanced things with Harvey.”

Batman: Caped Crusader reverses the polarity of Two-Face, in a sense. While most versions have made him the story of a good man whose burn scars turn him maniacal, this show starts him out as a corrupt DA who uses his position to help rich criminals evade justice. “We thought, Well, what if he starts off as kind of a schnook? And then when he gets his face disfigured, for the first time in his life he actually feels empathy for other people,” Timm says.

Two-Face is still a bad guy, but like Harley Quinn, he’s lashing out for what he believes is a noble cause. Like Batman himself, all of them live outside the law for what they consider righteous reasons.