Nowadays, a streaming site will cancel and disappear any kind of content on a whim—finished films, renewed shows, beloved cartoons. But Batgirl was, as star Brendan Fraser put it, “the canary in the coal mine” for this current era of utter disrespect towards commissioned, completed work. Setting aside the supposed quality of the film (something that has been debated and speculated on since the cancellation), it remains a bummer that we’ll never see Fraser’s Firefly face off with Leslie Grace’s Batgirl, something the heroine knows all too well.
“I truly had one of [the best] experiences with Batgirl. In terms of the experience of shooting, we were all so excited for people to see a lot of the action, a lot of the practical shots we did with fire. Our movie was full of practical fire, which was really hard to shoot,” Grace reflects in a new interview with Collider. “Brendan [Fraser], our villain, our Firefly, he was just so outstanding and so happy that he’s having this incredible moment—this Brenaissance as everyone says. He’s amazing. He’s one of the kindest people in the world, and I felt so blessed to have him as my sparring partner. We had so many amazing action scenes together where we were beating each other up, but hugging in between takes because he’s just so sweet.”
She continued, “So I would’ve loved people to see those moments, but you know what? You have the experience, and you keep on rolling, and I feel so blessed, all in all, that I have those memories and hopefully maybe in some future, some clips will arise and people will get to enjoy a little bit of it. But for now, we’ll just have to keep it going as it going in comic folklore, I guess, with all of our memories and our stories while we can.”
Fraser expressed similar sentiments back in October, when he told Variety, “It’s tragic. It doesn’t engender trust among filmmakers and the studio. Leslie Grace was fantastic. She’s a dynamo, just a spot-on performer. Everything that we shot was real and exciting and just the antithesis of doing a straightforward digital all green screen thing. They ran firetrucks around downtown Glasgow at 3 in the morning and they had flamethrowers. It was a big-budget movie, but one that was just stripped down to the essentials.”