Matt Reeves's The Batman Part II just locked its biggest casting reveal yet: Sebastian Stan as Harvey Dent (with the Two-Face arc clearly seeded), Scarlett Johansson as Gilda Dent, and Charles Dance as Harvey's father Christopher Dent. Game of Thrones, Captain America: Winter Soldier, and The Avengers stars converge on Gotham.
Matt Reeves's sequel to The Batman (2022) has spent two-plus years in carefully-paced casting reveals. This week's announcements — confirmed by Reeves directly on social media and through Warner Bros. press releases — represent the most consequential casting batch since Robert Pattinson signed on for the original. The three reveals together establish that the sequel will use the Dent family as its primary dramatic spine rather than introducing a new villain in isolation.
Sebastian Stan as Harvey Dent is the headline. Stan exits the MCU (after his run as Bucky Barnes / The Winter Soldier from Captain America: The Winter Soldier in 2014 through Thunderbolts* in 2025) into a project that explicitly seeds the Two-Face transformation. Reeves has historically been cautious about villain transformations — Paul Dano's Riddler in the original was kept human and human-sized — so the question of when (or if) Stan transitions visually into Two-Face within Part II remains a major open question. Casting an actor of Stan's caliber for a role that could be 30% Harvey Dent / 70% Two-Face suggests Reeves intends to give the Dent arc significant screen time across multiple films.
Scarlett Johansson as Gilda Dent deepens the casting weight further. Gilda Dent — Harvey's wife in the comic-book canon, whose murder is one of Two-Face's foundational trauma sequences — has been adapted on screen before (most notably in Tim Burton's Batman Forever (1995), where she was reduced to a brief side character). Johansson's prominence in the casting suggests Gilda has been substantially rewritten to function as a full dramatic counterweight to Harvey rather than as a plot device. Johansson herself was last seen in the MCU in 2021's Black Widow; her return to comic-book cinema as a DC role is itself an industry story.
Charles Dance as Christopher Dent rounds out the family. Dance — best known internationally as Tywin Lannister from Game of Thrones — plays Harvey's father, who appears to be a major influence on the Dent character's arc. Tywin-style patriarchal gravitas in a Gotham crime-drama setting could be the most distinctive performance addition to the franchise since Andy Serkis joined as Alfred in the first film.
Supporting additions include Sebastian Koch (in an unspecified role, but his casting suggests another major Gotham figure) and Brian Tyree Henry — who previously appeared as Phastos in Marvel Studios' Eternals (2021). Henry's MCU-to-DC crossing in the same calendar year as Sebastian Stan's marks 2026 as the year Marvel and DC's casting pools officially overlap.
The returning cast remains anchored by Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne, Jeffrey Wright as Lt. Jim Gordon, Andy Serkis as Alfred Pennyworth, and Colin Farrell as Oz Cobb (now spun off into HBO's The Penguin). Paul Dano's Edward Nashton has not been confirmed but is widely expected to appear.
The Batman Part II releases October 1, 2027. The film exists in its own Elseworlds continuity outside both the original DCEU and James Gunn's new DCU — it remains separate from Superman (2025), Supergirl (2026), and the upcoming Wonder Woman. For broader DC context, see our DCEU/DCU hub, our classic DC films, our Every Batman Actor Ranked pillar, and our DCU Batman speculation pillar.