George Clooney Gives Blunt Response When Asked if He'd Reprise Batman Again

George Clooney surprised audiences when he made a cameo as Batman in Warner Bros. Pictures' heavily-maligned The Flash over the summer, along with fellow former caped crusaders Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck. But don't expect the 62-year-old to don Bruce Wayne's cape—err, molded rubber nipples—again, because the actor is retiring the character for good.

Speaking with Entertainment Tonight at the Los Angeles premiere of his new film, The Boys in the Boat, which he produced and directed, Clooney made it unequivocally clear that he has no interest in going down that road again.

"Well I thought there was such a clamor for me to come back as [Batman], as you know," Clooney joked, when asked how the cameo in The Flash came to be.

"I actually said, 'Where are my rubber nipples?'" he continued, referring to the questionable costuming choice in the 1997 superhero flick, Batman & Robin. And they were like, 'Can we do it without the rubber nipples?' I was like, 'Well, it's not really my Batman, is it?'"

But when asked if he could be convinced to do it again, Clooney deadpanned: "I don't think there's enough drugs in the world for me to go back there."

When Batman & Robin first came out, no small amount of fanfare was made out of the nipples sculpted into the suits. In a 2022 interview, costume designer Jose Fernandez was brutally honest about the choice, which he says was not his idea.

After having designed comparatively more subtle nipples in Val Kilmer's costume for 1995's Batman Forever, Fernandez said that director Joel Schumacher wanted to double down for the fourth and final installment in the film series.

"Well, in the first one, they were just a little blob of clay. It was subtle—it was a blip" he recalled. "But for Batman & Robin, Joel Schumacher loved the nipples, so he said, 'Let’s showcase them.' Schumacher wanted them sharpened, like, with points. They were also circled, both outer and inner—it was all made into a feature of the batsuit."

"I didn’t want to do it, but he’s the boss, so we sharpened them, circled them and it all became kind of ridiculous," Fernandez added.

In either case, nipples or no nipples, Clooney sounds like he's done for good.