UPDATE: Joseph-Gordon Levitt confirmed to play Alberto Falcone in The Dark Knight Rises, or maybe not

Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s long-rumored role in The Dark Knight Rises has been revealed to be Alberto Falcone, youngest son of Carmine Falcone—played by Tom Wilkinson in Batman Begins—whose ostracizing from the Falcone crime family and desire to prove he was a badass spurred him to become Holiday, a serial killer with a taste for Hallmark Store tchotchkes and rubber nipples. Of course, bringing Falcone into the mix doesn’t necessarily mean that Christopher Nolan is intent on introducing Holiday, but with Catwoman definitely on board, the pieces are certainly already in place for Dark Knight Rises to follow elements of The Long Halloween and Dark Victory storylines, which also featured a subplot where Selina Kyle begins investigating whether she is Carmine Falcone’s illegitimate daughter.

But then, given that the also-confirmed Bane was nowhere near the events of those stories, it seems pretty clear Nolan isn’t going for a straight adaptation here. (Also arguing against: The pronounced role of Harvey Dent’s wife Gilda, whom Harvey never actually got around to marrying in Nolan’s movies.) He is, however, obviously attempting to bring his trilogy to a tidy end by revisiting elements he introduced in the first film—particularly if Marion Cotillard plays Talia al Ghul as rumored, and we all continue to agree that Katie Holmes and Maggie Gyllenhaal are the same person. As always, we’ll just have to wait and speculate every few days or so on how he's going to pull it off. In the meantime, we now also know that British actress Juno Temple has signed on to play a “street-smart Gotham girl,” which is the weirdest description of the Riddler we’ve ever heard, but okay.

UPDATE: In keeping with the constant frustration of Batman-related news, Variety's earlier confirmation that Gordon-Levitt would be playing Falcone is now being disputed by Entertainment Weekly, who quotes its own source close to the production—one that is presumably closer than the "close sources" Variety quoted earlier—as saying that those reports are false. Normally we'd expect this kind of back-and-forth to take place between much less reputable publications, so we're not really sure who to believe here. Maybe we should just wait until we see the movie.

 
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