There’s a good chance, up until this point, you could have thought the news that Batman’s butler was getting his very own origin-story spy show was some elaborate joke. However, if that’s the case, the joke’s now on you, because Epix just released a teaser for that exact show: Pennyworth.
It’s not a teaser trailer, though. More like a teaser for a trailer because it’s less than 20 seconds long, but in that time you get a sense of what this show is—and are reminded time and time again of Alfred’s nationality (British, just in case you somehow miss it). We can finally say for a fact, yes, this show actually exists.
Jack Bannon plays the title character in Pennyworth, “a former British SAS soldier in his 20s, who forms a security company and goes to work with a young billionaire Thomas Wayne (Ben Aldridge), who’s not yet Bruce’s father, in 1960s London,” according to the press release.
“An essential mystery there is ‘How did a gung-ho SAS soldier wind up a butler?’ That is not the natural progression,” executive producer Bruno Heller, told TV Insider. “As far I know, Michael Caine, when he was asked the play the part [in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy] said ‘I don’t want to play [a straight-out] butler.’”
That, in turn, informed Heller’s vision of Alfred on Gotham, which he also created. It’s not been stated that Pennyworth is a direct prequel to Gotham (which is ending this year), but it very well could be.
“We learn about everything he’s gone through,” Bannon also TV Insider. “The war was a big part of his formative years because he was in the army for 10 years. When we meet him, he’s out of it, but through a series of flashbacks, we learn some of the horrors he went through and how they shaped the man he is today.”
I mean, that kind of sounds good, right? Who knows. We’ll find out when the 10-episode Pennyworth premieres on Epix this summer.
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