Kevin Conroy Will Be Missed
News of voice actor Kevin Conroy’s untimely passing came as a sad surprise as the info circulated on social media and subsequently the enthusiast entertainment press last Friday. Conroy, according to fellow voice actors he kept in touch with, had been ill for a while before losing the battle to what was later confirmed to be intestinal cancer. His last significant public appearance was at TerrifiCon in Connecticut in July 2022, a sign of how quickly a person can be here, appear in fine health, yet be gone in a short time.
Conroy had several roles over the years, but by far the biggest was his time as the voice of Bruce Wayne/Batman, which started with Batman: The Animated Series in 1992 and continued across several DC animated works, movies, and video games. He even made a live-action appearance as Bruce Wayne in the Batwoman CW series, as part of the Crisis on Infinite Earths plotline. The man played the role for almost precisely three decades, and certainly would have continued if it wasn’t for his passing. His final time playing the role was in the Warner Bros. free-to-play Smash Bros.-style game MultiVersus. Conroy had several other roles throughout his life, but Batman was by far the biggest. The role will stick with the biggest Batman animated fans for years to come.
It’s been about five days since news of his passing circulated as of this writing, but Conroy has been on my mind more and more since then. It took time for me to realize just how influential his voice was on my life. I watched a lot of Batman TAS in my younger years, one of the first cartoons that seriously (figuratively) sunk its pointy teeth into me. The cartoon started airing when I was eight years old, a time when a growing boy wanted to get away from more “childish” content they’d previously watched but didn’t want to entirely drift away from cartoons. TAS had a more mature tone than other cartoons at that point despite also being fine for older boys to watch, the perfect show for me. It’s aged gracefully in the time since.
Conroy’s performance as Batman/Bruce was a big part of that. It’s sad that I’m only now fully realizing how important his performance was to the series and myself in my early life, with other superlative performances from the show assisting with that. It’s also startling that this is happening after I’d heard his Batman voice for so long as part of other works, including (occasionally) Superman: The Animated Series, the Justice League shows, and Rocksteady Studios’ Batman: Arkham titles. Whenever a studio at DC needed his performance, he was there. The other Batman/Bruce voices, solid as they were, felt like facsimiles to me after Conroy’s interpretation was the first one to hook me in. That’s how nostalgia works, but that similarly speaks to how perfect a fit he was for the character.
It was Conroy’s voice that floored all other Batman performances, during and after Batman TAS went off the air. Michael Keaton’s voice was fine, while Val Kilmer’s would have been solid if given a better script, though neither compared to Conroy. The less said about George Clooney’s the better, something he agrees with. Christian Bale’s Batman voice is largely remembered for the jokes these days, not a good place to be for movies as serious as the Nolan Dark Knight trilogy despite them being quality products with good scripts. No one’s topped Conroy’s Batman, and I’m having a hard time imagining that anyone ever will.
Conroy left us too soon, but it’s fortunate that he was given the opportunity to discuss how he came to be the voice of the character he played for so long in Finding Batman. One thing I lamented about Conroy’s history in voicework, including prior to his death, is how he didn’t have any big roles outside the character. Part of the reason for that was darker than I expected: Conroy sometimes felt excluded thanks to his homosexuality.
Conroy didn’t come out until he revealed it during an interview with the New York Times in 2016, as part of the promotional campaign for The Killing Joke’s animated adaptation. We’ve now reached a time where gay men are largely not typecasted into playing certain roles and forbidden from playing a macho one like Batman, which makes it more tragic that Conroy couldn’t express himself without potentially jeopardizing the big role he had until a time when it was mostly convenient to do so.
It will feel like something’s missing from future Batman animated and video game works without Conroy voicing Batman/Bruce, beyond further content in MultiVersus. It was unrealistic to expect that he would play the character forever — no one can. And I don’t intend to undermine the talents of people like Roger Craig Smith, Bruce Greenwood, and even Troy Baker. But Conroy’s voice will be impossible to replace. It’s a pity we didn’t have the opportunity to enjoy Conroy’s performance for several more years, but I’m also thankful for how long we were able to enjoy it.
About The Author
Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
