'The Batman': See the 'very cool' deleted scene showing Barry Keoghan's Joker vs. Robert Pattinson

“The Batman” reintroduces one of the Dark Knight's greatest foes with a cameo from Barry Keoghan as the notorious Joker, and director Matt Reeves has revealed a deleted scene featuring this new take on the Clown Prince of Crime alongside Robert Pattinson’s Caped Crusader.

“He is fantastic,” Reeves tells USA TODAY about Keoghan, who gets just a minute of screen time in the theatrical release (and is officially credited as “Unseen Arkham Prisoner”) but gets a lot more to do in what the filmmaker describes as a "very cool" deleted scene.

In the sequence, Batman – who is unsettled by the serial killer Riddler (Paul Dano) addressing his cyphers and puzzles to the hero personally – wants to get into a murderer's mind-set. So he goes to Arkham State Hospital prison to profile Joker, “like something out of ‘Manhunter,’ ” Reeves says, and it's clear that Batman put him there.

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“You realize this guy seems to have a lot of psychological insight and he really is getting into Batman's head,” Reeves says. “He's saying, ‘This is very interesting that you are resisting this idea, trying to understand why this guy's writing you. I mean, aren't you guys the same? You're both masked avengers, right? Are you upset because he's more righteous than you? He makes you look soft, is that the problem?’

“(Batman’s) like, ‘I don't want to talk about me.’ And he's like, ‘Oh, you're very interesting. I don't know why you don't want to talk about you.’ And that was really delicious.”

Keoghan weighed in via Twitter: "Honestly I am stuck for words but I am very very BLESSED to play this role after the AMAZING AMAZING Actors before me."

Riddler and fellow Bat-foe Penguin (Colin Farrell) receive realistic reinventions in Reeves' film, and the same goes with Joker, with a wild-haired Keoghan in a Arkham prison jumpsuit, wearing an unsettling grin on his disfigured face. Like the others, however, he’s not yet the infamous figure we know.

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Reeves says Christopher Nolan explored “a really haunting thing” by never giving a concrete reason for Heath Ledger's Joker scars in “The Dark Knight" – they're just one of many unknowable aspects of an unstable villain. Other versions (like Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton’s 1989 “Batman”) have the Joker fall into a vat of acid or chemicals as part of his origin story.

Reeves liked the idea of “a lifelong curse” and embraced a Joker akin to the Elephant Man, in this case a guy who essentially had a congenital disease "where he could never stop smiling.”

“He had this horrible disfigurement and it had colored his worldview completely – he realized that his life in that way was a complete joke,” Reeves says. “It made him very nihilistic and attuned him to an insidious sort of incisiveness, of getting into people's psychology, watching people being uncomfortable watching him and all of that.”

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The new Joker also gets an appearance near the end of the movie, and with only the top of his face seen through a cell door.

Now incarcerated, Riddler watches on TV how his nefarious grand plans to flood Gotham City were foiled by Batman. Afterward, he receives a morale-boosting pep talk in Arkham from his mysterious neighbor.

“Isn’t that just terrible? Him raining on your parade like that?" Joker says to the Riddler. "One day you’re on top, the next you’re a clown. Let me tell you, there are worse things to be.”

When Dano’s villain asks Joker who he is, the Joker responds, “Riddle me this: The less of them you have, the more one is worth.” When Riddler answers “a friend,” the two share a laugh – in Joker's case, a familiar high-pitched cackle to cement a blossoming criminal relationship.

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Reeves insists Joker’s appearance in "The Batman" isn’t “a classic sort of superhero movie Easter egg” to say that he’s central to the next movie. Instead, the director wanted to plant the seeds that “there's this continuing danger that's brewing” in Gotham City because of the power vacuum following the death of mob boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro).

The conversation between Joker and Riddler “weirdly changed the stakes” for the very next scene with Batman and Selina Kyle (Zo? Kravitz), aka Catwoman, in “The Batman” finale, where she’s heading out of town for good and wants Batman to come along.

“When she says, ‘You know, this place is never going to change,’ you've just seen it's never going to change,” Reeves says, “and it actually made that scene more poignant.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Barry Keoghan's Joker from 'The Batman' revealed in new deleted scene