The Dark Knight Rises is perhaps the most divisive entry in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, with one of its most controversial elements being Tom Hardy's Bane.
Whitewashed in the adaptation itself - with the Bane from the comics hailing from the fictional Latin American nation of Santa Prisca - Nolan also gave the mercenary a brand new origin. Out went Venom (the drug used to enhance his strength and size), and in came training from the League of Shadows - the big twist obviously being that the character was Talia al Ghul's guardian when they were locked together in the pit.
There was, however, another scene that fleshed out Nolan's interpretation of Bane that ended up being cut from the film. It's also one we'll never get to see, with the director a firm believer in the the idea that if it's not in the final cut, it wasn't worth seeing anyway.
In any case, costume designer Lindy Hemming did let slip what this scene would've entailed. In a conversation with GQ, Hemming said that a sequence actually showed how Bane got his mask - a key piece of the film's iconography and probably something that would've been worth developing, had the running time allowed it.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
