Fox's Gotham has introduced some iconic DC Comics villains over the first two seasons, and Season 3 will be pulling one of Batman's most bizarrely scary villains out of the pages and onto the screen. The Mad Hatter will menace Jim Gordon and Co. with his hypnotism next season on Gotham, and the show may have cast the perfect person for the role. Benedict Samuel of The Walking Dead will appear as Jarvis Tetch, AKA the Mad Hatter.
Benedict Samuel played the Alpha Wolf known as Owen throughout Season 6 of The Walking Dead. The Wolves plot itself really wasn't all that great, but Samuel was pretty great at bringing the creepy in a show already filled with zombies and villains. He's probably the most memorable part of the entire Wolves story, so his casting for Gotham Season 3 actually bodes pretty well. He can obviously portray a character with a case of the crazies, and the Mad Hatter will need to be off his rocker if he's going to stand out among all the other Gotham villains to date. Samuel has also played a variety of TV roles over the years, on shows ranging from The Beautiful Lie to Secret City. There are plenty of directions he could go with the Hatter on Gotham.
The Mad Hatter of Gotham is a hypnotist whose madness drives him to use his talents for nefarious purposes when he arrives in Gotham, according to TVLine. He shows up in the midst of a quest to recover his missing sister Alice, who has been missing for many years. Her last known location was in Gotham, and the Mad Hatter won't be put off by anything that gets in his way as he tries to find his sister.
The Mad Hatter of DC Comics lore uses mid-control technology to manipulate whoever he needs to further his schemes. He uses hats - either his own or those that he forces onto his victims - to exert his influence. The Hatter borrowed his name from Alice in Wonderland and used themes from the book in designing his dastardly plots.
It's actually not a huge surprise that the Mad Hatter is on the way for Season 3. Although he did not show up in Season 2 as evidently intended, Dr. Hugo Strange himself dropped a few lines of foreshadowing that pointed to the arrival of the Mad Hatter sooner rather than later. Strange quoted some of the most famous lines about madness from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland while holding onto a copy of Through the Looking Glass and discussing his resurrection process with Ms. Peabody. It was pretty clear that the Mad Hatter was going to make his mad entrance; the big question was of how. Strange's comments hinted that the Mad Hatter was already dead and going to be resurrected. We can guess that he was on the bus out of Indian Hill that has now loosed some of Strange's especially unnatural creatures on the streets of Gotham.
Assuming that the Mad Hatter was reanimated from death, I'm curious to know just how long ago he died. Strange could have had the Hatter on ice for a long time. The Hatter may have died long ago, and the case of his sister may have gone very cold thanks to the passage of time. That almost certainly won't be enough to dissuade the Hatter from going after Gordon and the rest of the good guys. Only time will tell if Jarvis Tetch has always been mad or if the resurrection process drove him over the edge.
Unfortunately, we still have a lot of time to wait until we get to see Benedict Samuel as the Mad Hatter in Season 3 of Gotham when it premieres on September 19. Check out our fall TV premiere schedule to see when your other favorite shows will return to the airwaves.
