The club of people who have played Bruce Wayne’s Butler Alfred Pennyworth in the Batman universe is set to increase by one. Sean Pertwee has scored the role for the new Fox TV series Gotham{
Pertwee’s name is among a batch of new casting announcements for the series, which rolls the clock back to the younger days of the Caped Crusader (indeed, to the time before the cape, when he’s still a young man struggling to deal with the death of his parents). It focuses instead on the rise of Detective Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie, whose casting was recently revealed) as a working plod during his pre-Commissioner career.
The Alfred in the show seems closer to the version played by Michael Caine in Christopher Nolan’s Bat-films, a former military man and loyal servant of the Wayne family who is fiercely protective of his young charge.
Robin Lord Taylor has been cast as Oswald Cobblepot, the future Penguin, who at this stage of the story is a low-level psycho grunt working for gangster Fish Mooney, but who is always making plans to rise up the ranks and achieve his criminal aims. Zabryna Guevara will be Captain Essen, Gordon’s boss at the Gotham Police Department, a tactical thinker who can play politics as adeptly as she handles criminals.
Finally there’s Erin Richards, on as Gordon’s fiancée, a doctor every bit his equal who's worried about his future in the corrupt city. With The Mentalist’s writer-producer Bruno Heller running the show and CSI’s Danny Cannon directing the pilot, the show will be on the air later this year.