All World News Catch: ‘Pennyworth’ Trailer: Batman’s Butler Gets His Own Origin Story

Saturday, 30 March 2019

‘Pennyworth’ Trailer: Batman’s Butler Gets His Own Origin Story

If you’ve ever watched a Batman movie or TV show, or read a Batman comic, and thought, “I wish they’d tell me about Alfred when he was a handsome young man!”, then you’re in luck. The EPIX series Pennyworth goes back to the swingin’ ’60s to tell the origin story of Bruce Wayne’s famous butler/surrogate father. Watch the Pennyworth trailer below.

Pennyworth Trailer

Gotham is coming to an end, but if you want more Batman-related TV shows without Batman himself, you might want to check out Pennyworth. The upcoming EPIX series “follows Bruce Wayne’s legendary butler, Alfred Pennyworth (Jack Bannon), a former British SAS soldier in his 20s, who forms a security company and goes to work with a young billionaire Thomas Wayne (Ben Aldridge), who’s not yet Bruce’s father, in 1960s London.”

As silly as this may sound, there is some precedent for “ass-kicking young Alfred.” In the Batman comics, Alfred’s backstory includes being an MI-5 agent long before he became the Wayne family butler. And in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Michael Caine’s Alfred tells a memorable story about working for the local government in Burma when he was a younger man, and trying to catch a bandit. This show will fill in the blanks of Alfred’s life, and presumably explain why an ass-kicking secret agent would eventually decide to become a butler.

And if the prospect of seeing a young, hot Alfred who probably fucks isn’t enough to get you interested in this show, what if I told you Pennyworth features the descendants of Jack the Ripper, too?

“It’s twenty-something years before Gotham, it’s a very different world,” executive producer Danny Cannon said in a past interview. “It’s not the England we know. It looks and feels like, but if you look a little closer, [you ask], ‘Why is that like that? Why is that building there? What war is he talking about?’ [The show will feature] archetypal villains and classic villains of British literature; they’re all available to us. Jack the Ripper was [around in the] 1880s, but he has descendants.”

In addition to Bannon and Aldridge, Pennyworth also stars recording artist Paloma Faith, Jason Flemyng (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), Ryan Fletcher (Outlander), Hainsley Lloyd Bennett (Eastenders), Emma Paetz (Gentleman Jack), and Polly Walker (The Mentalist, Rome).