Kid approved! Misha Collins wasn’t thrilled about the idea of leaving his family in California to play the iconic Batman villain Harvey Dent/Two-Face in Gotham Knights after more than a decade filming Supernatural in Canada — but his son made it an easy choice.
“In all honesty, the only thing that made me not want to take this job was the fact that my kids are in Southern California,” the Massachusetts native, 48, exclusively told Us Weekly ahead of the CW show’s Tuesday, March 14, debut. “The show was gonna film in Toronto and Atlanta, and it was gonna take me away from them quite a bit. Yeah, I had a really hard time wrapping my head around that, and I broached it with my children.”
Collins shares son West, 12, and daughter Maison, 10, with wife Vicki Collins (née Vantoch), who he married in 2001.
“My son in particular — who knows well who Harvey Dent/Two-Face is — I said, ‘You know, I’m gonna be filming in Atlanta and I’m gonna be gone a lot if I take this job.’ And he was like, ‘Do it.’ And I was like, ‘Well, honey, listen, I’m not gonna be able to be around as much.’ And he said, ‘Dad, do it, please,’” the Roadfood host recalled.
“He was so eager for me to take the role and it actually hurt my feelings,” Collins joked. “He thought it was cool enough that it totally trumped wanting to spend time with his father. I think both of them are harboring some excitement about maybe potentially having some small feeling that their dad is in one way cool for the first time.”
It’s easy to see why they’d be excited. Collins is playing one of the most famous Batman villains, Two-Face. However, Gotham Knights introduces Harvey Dent before he loses touch with reality. He’s a detective who is trying to solve Batman/Bruce Wayne’s murder.
“Harvey Dent in the very first episode is trying to take Bruce Wayne’s adopted son [Turner Hayes, played by Oscar Morgan] under his wing and figure out how to protect him in the wake of his father’s death — and that particular goal is upended very quickly when [Turner] is accused of murdering his father,” Collins teased.
Turner teams up with The Joker’s daughter Duela (Olivia Rose Keegan), Cullen Row (Tyler DiChiara), Harper Row (Fallon Smythe) and Carrie Kelley (Navia Robinson).
As Dent tries to solve Batman’s murder and starts questioning whether Turner is, in fact, the killer, the detective starts having trouble. “That investigation is encumbered by the fact that I, [as] Harvey Dent, I’m starting to see cracks in my own psyche,” the actor revealed. “I’m experiencing gaps in time and memory lapses, and I don’t quite know what’s happening. So, as my greater world unravels with the discovery that my best friend is actually Batman, my inner world is also unraveling and I’m desperately trying to clinging to my own sanity.”
The New York Times bestselling author (he published Some Things I Still Can’t Tell You: Poems in 2021) was happy to learn that Gotham Knights wouldn’t have Dent become Two-Face with the flip of a switch. “Traditionally, the character has been presented in this slightly complicated light where he is physically disfigured in this one traumatic event, and then that causes him to become insane, but not only insane [but also] evil,” Collins told Us. “[That’s] not great commentary on physical disability and having a catastrophic accident. I’m no psychiatrist, but I think, typically, that does not make a person become an evil villain.”
Gotham Knights gives Two-Face more complexity and depth, and the story is structured to follow Dent’s slow descent into villain territory. “We’re not gonna just have this one incident that makes him snap, but instead we’re gonna show how he could have been so fragile that this incident could have pushed him over the edge,” the Supernatural alum said. “We get into a history of mental illness. Harvey Dent’s father suffered from what colloquially is called split personality disorder, and Harvey had a very abusive childhood. We show Harvey trying to white-knuckle it and hold onto his sanity as he gets more and more evidence that he has this other side. This other personality is not necessarily nefarious, but certainly not bounded by the same moral and ethical rules that govern Harvey’s life.”
Viewers can witness Harvey Dent’s unraveling when Gotham Knights premieres on The CW Tuesday, March 14, at 9 p.m. ET.
