“I felt disoriented and lost as an actor whose identity was being yanked from him. Was I my public face or my private face? Had I made too many compromises? My heart pulsed, I felt my face flush, my breath grew deeper. I began to speak, and a voice I didn’t recognize came out. It was a throaty, husky, rumbling sound that shook my body. It seemed to roar from thirty years of frustration, confusion, denial, love, yearning. Yearning for what? An anchor, a harbor, a sense of safety, a sense of identity. Yes, I can relate. Yes, this is terrain I know well. I felt Batman rising from deep within.”
Those are the words of Kevin Conroy, a kind, sensitive man who suffered tremendously as a child and young actor before quite literally finding his voice as Batman in the legendary Batman: The Animated Series. Conroy, a man who felt pressured to frequently wear a mask his whole life (to prevent the bullying and hatred of others for being gay, to help his suicidal, alcoholic father, to survive in an alpha industry like television), immediately related to Batman, and his performance as the caped crusader would lead to more of the best animated Batman titles, including Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Batman: Gotham Knight, and Batman: The Killing Joke.
The actor died Nov. 10th from cancer, leaving behind his husband Vaughn C. Williams and a legion of fans who preferred him (or at least ranked him equally) to more popular actors who’ve played Batman, liked Michael Keaton and Christian Bale. Before he passed, Conroy laid his life bare in a comic that he wrote for DC Pride 2022, entitled Finding Batman. The short comic (drawn and colored by J. Bone and lettered by Aditya Bidikar) remains an invaluable resource into the actor’s life, but also an extremely moving testament to the struggles of LGBTQ+ individuals, the positive fantasies of superheroes, and the power of hope in the face of darkness. To honor Conroy, take a look at Finding Batman, and please, read it for yourself here.
“Exactly 30 years ago, I ventured into an audition for a character I knew little about, in a medium I had no experience in. His flawed humanity, his overcoming life’s challenges, his having a public face and a private one – all these characteristics resonated with people. I often marveled at how appropriate it was that I should land the role.” So begins Conroy’s comic Finding Batman, which sees the actor entering an audition for Batman: The Animated Series. Conroy discusses his alcoholic father, his parents’ divorce, and a brother suffering from schizophrenia. Conroy goes on to describe the time his mother forced him to visit his father in the hospital (after he was found bleeding out from self-inflicted knife wounds in the woods), as she wanted little to do with him.
“I ran six miles every day,” recalled Conroy in the Inside of You podcast. “I did everything I could to release anxiety, because I grew up with an incredible amount of anxiety tied up inside of me […] I was drinking too much, I was doing drugs, I was smoking a pack a day, and I was having seizures. I had something called psychomotor epilepsy […] a long-term anxiety that comes from growing up in a situation of such anxiety, such tension, that your nervous system has this valve that you’ve developed, and it’s giving you these seizures.”
Conroy’s childhood was obviously traumatic, so when he approached the character of Batman, a person who witnessed his parents’ death as a child and arguably spent his life attempting to come to terms with that trauma, everything seemed to click for him. Conroy hadn’t really played anyone like that before, mainly appearing in sparse episodes of television and made-for-TV movies (though he was amazing as a corporate scumbag in the very short-lived 1995 series The Office, a workplace comedy very much like the similarly titled juggernauts in the UK and U.S. which it predates).
Finding Batman goes on to beautifully, albeit painfully, detail Conroy’s development from a grotesquely bullied and troubled youth to, well, Batman himself. Aside from chronicling that curmudgeonly superhero, Conroy poignantly describes the struggles of the gay experience in the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond. The man who would become the voice of Batman writes:
There’s a darkness to Batman’s origin story which many people relate to. When Conroy opened himself up and shared his own origins, though, it became clear that reality could be much darker than The Dark Knight. Conroy, however, put on the mask, wore the cape, and stepped behind the microphone, refusing to give up. He knew Batman — he was Batman.
“They talked me through the character. Explained how young Bruce Wayne had seen his parents murdered in front of him in Crime Alley. How he had formed dual personalities to deal with the agony of his childhood. A mask of confidence to the world… and a private one rached by conflict and wounds. Could I relate to that, they asked,” Conroy writes in Finding Batman, which leads us to where we began. “Yes, I can relate,” he writes. “I felt Batman rising from deep within.”
Fans likely feel him too after the news of his passing, and that voice being echoed within us is none other than Conroy’s himself.
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