“Holy Firefly, Brendan, you mean they really blew this shit up?
That’s essentially what Brendan Fraser told Howard Stern about the decision to swat down the Batgirl flick in which he was to play the villainous pyromaniac known as Firefly aka Ted Carson. In Fraser’s opinion, the film was “great.”
Continuing with the interview, Fraser heaped praise on directors Adil El Arbi and Bidall Fallah of Bad Boys fame, who he said “are really good at blowing shit up and they love doing it. You know, like practical fire effects making stuff go bang, they’re all over it, and so Firefly is right in their wheelhouse. Gotham never looked better cast as Glasgow, Scotland. You know it’s adecaying and just gorgeous. It looks like it’s Gotham City. It’s perfectly cast. You believe it no matter where you look at the town, if you light it the right way.”
Fraser went on to lament the film’s cancellation, saying he “relished” the role of a disgruntled veteran who was determined to get back at a system that was denying his hard-won benefits. “What else is he gonna do but burn it to the ground?” he declared. “That’s a supervillain right there. You’ve got some sympathy for him. You’ve also got some humanity to him and on top of that a screw loose cause you know he’s the bad guy.”
The 54-year-old American-Canadian actor admitted he hadn’t seen the film, but he had friends and coworkers who saw it and attested to its good quality. “It was a director’s cut, first cut,” he says, suggesting that fact might have played a role in the decision to shelve it by Warner Brothers bigwigs who declared it “irredeemable.”
DC Studios co-chief Peter Safran was quoted as saying the “very bold and courageous decision” was made to cancel Batgirl because the film “ would have hurt DC. It would have hurt those people involved.”
Fraser lamented, “It wasn’t finished. I don’t know about you, but I don’t eat half-baked cake. I don’t want to see something that’s not ready yet. The sad thing is that I don’t know if it was judged on merit. It wasn’t shown in the best light that it could have been.”
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