Another Batman 3 casting rumor has surfaced. They grow like weeds. Most of them are wrong so treat this with extreme skepticism: A site called Hollywoodlife claims Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Batman director Christopher Nolan’s first choice to play The Riddler in his sequel to The Dark Knight.

As evidence they offer only an unnamed source whom they claim is close to the director. Weighted against this rumor however is the fact that Nolan is still pretty busy releasing his new movie Inception and probably hasn’t even really started working on another Batman movie yet. Even if they had, they still don’t have a script. I doubt they’ve even decided which villain they’ll use. This rumor seems as unlikely as all the others.

But oh how I want it to be likely.

Levitt belongs in Nolan’s Batman universe. He’s a brilliant actor who could really nail something like this. Personally I’d rather see him playing Clayface, Riddler’s already been done once in the Batman world and it’d be nice to see them tackling someone different (in fact Nolan has already hinted that he might avoid any already used villains). Unfortunately since Clayface has unbelievably weird superpowers (he’s made of clay, almost literally), brilliant character though he is, probably doesn’t fit very well into Nolan’s ultra-realistic Batman world. If Levitt really did end up being Riddler, I won’t complain. He’ll be brilliant.