Titans
has found its Master of Fear.
Deadline is reporting that the HBO Max series Titans, based on the DC Comics superteam, has cast Vincent Kartheiser as Dr. Jonathan Crane, better known to Batman fans as the fear-inducing supervillain known as The Scarecrow. Kartheiser joins fellow Season 3 cast additions Savannah Welch, who’ll play Gotham police commissioner Barbara Gordon, and Jay Lycurgo (I May Destroy You), who’ll play Tim Drake, the third Robin.
According to the article, Crane will be featured in the show's upcoming third season and is simply described as "an inmate at Arkham Asylum who used to terrorize Gotham City using toxins to exploit his enemies’ phobias."
Kartheiser, 41, is best known as Pete Campbell on the AMC series Mad Men and as Connor on the WB series Angel. He's appeared in the films Rango, Alpha Dog, and The Indian in the Cupboard. His other television appearances include Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Axe Cop, and ER.
Created in 1941 by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, the Scarecrow first appeared in World's Finest Comics #3 as Dr. Jonathan Crane, who bullied at school for his resemblance to Ichabod Crane from Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, leading him to become bitter and antisocial and also sparking his lifelong obsession with fear and using it as a weapon against others. Crane's obsession with fear led him to become a psychologist, taking a position at Arkham Asylum and performing fear-inducing experiments on his patients. He was also a professor of psychology at Gotham University, specializing in the study of phobias.
Crane lost his job after he fired a gun inside a packed classroom, accidentally wounding a student. He took revenge by killing the people responsible for his termination, and became a career criminal. The deaths of the Gotham University dean and four regents earned Crane the attention of Gotham City's newest guardian, the Batman. Batman, working alongside the recently promoted police captain Jim Gordon, traced the evidence back to Crane. Defending himself with his fear toxin and a makeshift costume, Crane officially embraced his nickname and became "the Scarecrow", but was apprehended by Batman and imprisoned in Arkham Asylum. The Scarecrow would later escape and have numerous encounters with Batman over the years, all leading to his eventual defeat.
As part of DC Comics' 2011 continuity reboot known as The New 52, the Scarecrow's origin was changed and in this version, Crane's father used him as a test subject in his fear-based experiments. During one of these experiments, Crane's father locked him inside a little dark room, but suffered a fatal heart attack before he could let Jonathan out. Jonathan was trapped in the test chamber for days until being freed by some employers of Gotham University. As a result of this event, Crane was irreparably traumatized and developed an obsession with fear. He became a psychologist, specializing in phobias, and eventually began using patients as test subjects for his fear toxin. In another change, The New 52 Scarecrow was fired from his professorship for covering an arachnophobic student with spiders, and became a criminal after stabbing a patient to death.
Kartheiser will be the fourth actor to portray the Scarecrow in live-action, after Cillian Murphy in the films Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, and Charlie Tahan and David W. Thompson in the Fox TV series Gotham. The character has also appeared in various animated projects, including The Batman/Superman Hour (voiced by Ted Knight), Challenge of the Super Friends (voiced by Don Messick), The Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians (voiced by Andre Stojka), Batman: The Animated Series (voiced by Henry Polic II), The New Batman Adventures (voiced by Jeffrey Combs), Batman: The Brave and the Bold (voiced by Dee Bradley Baker), Batman: Gotham Knight (voiced by Corey Burton), Batman: Hush (voiced by Chris Cox), and Harley Quinn (voiced by Rahul Kohli).
Titans will return to HBO Max for Season 3 on July 15, 2021.