Misha Collins is best known as Castiel from the CW’s Supernatural, but he’ll soon be joining another CW production. The actor announced via Twitter today that he’s going to play the part of Harvey Dent on the CW’s upcoming Gotham Knights pilot.
The official description for the character seems to give us a look at his character arc. Per Variety, “Dashing, with a swagger, Harvey Dent is Gotham’s charismatic, hard-charging District Attorney. With a rigid sense of right and wrong, Harvey’s idealism and single-minded quest for justice will ironically and tragically transform him into one of Gotham’s most feared supervillains, Two-Face.”
The Batman chronology is pretty complicated in the CW’s version of the DC Universe. Most of Batman’s villains, like the Penguin, Mad Hatter, Poison Ivy, and Joker, are in the character’s past. Batwoman encountered Harvey’s niece, Duela, in Season 1. The episode ended with Alice helping Duela remove her face, giving us a look at a particularly ghastly, faceless version of the character. Where Harvey is at in all of this is left somewhat undefined, though it is suggested that he’s alive.
On top of that, though, this series is not being propped up as a Batwoman spinoff. Where that series leaves Bruce Wayne’s fate open to interpretation, this series takes place after Bruce Wayne’s murder, with his adopted son forging an alliance with the children of some of Batman’s enemies after they’re framed for Wayne’s murder. In other words, it’s unclear whether or not this takes place in the same Arrowverse as those other shows. The Gotham Knights show is also not linked to the Gotham Knights game coming from Warner Bros Games.
The pilot will star Fallon Smythe and Tyler DiChiara, who will be series regulars if the pilot goes to series. Chad Fiveash, James Stoteraux, and Natalie Abrams are set to write and produce the pilot, with former Gotham showrunner Danny Cannon directing.. The CW has not yet set and air date for Gotham Knights.