Christopher Nolan had Cillian Murphy audition for Batman just so he could convince studio execs to cast him as Scarecrow instead in the 'Dark Knight' trilogy

• Christopher Nolan had Cillian Murphy audition for Batman though he knew Christian Bale would get the role.
• Nolan said he had studio executives watch Murphy's screen test to convince them to make him Scarecrow.

Christopher Nolan had an unconventional way to get Cillian Murphy into his "The Dark Knight" trilogy.

In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, the director and the actor recalled how Murphy ended up playing Scarecrow in 2005's "Batman Begins."

It turns out, Nolan first had Murphy audition as Batman.

"It was clear to me from the beginning that I wasn't Batman material," Murphy told EW. "It felt to me that it was correct and right that it should be Christian Bale for that part."

"But I remember the buzz of trying on the suit and being directed by you," Murphy told Nolan, who was also part of the interview. "Those tests were high production values."

"When we had our first conversation I think both of us knew that you weren't going to wind up playing Batman," Nolan added. "But I really wanted to get on set with you, I wanted to get you on film."

Murphy had been a fan of Nolan's earlier works like "Memento" and "Insomnia," which led to him scoring a screen test for "Batman Begins."

"We did those screen tests very elaborately, on 35mm, with a little set," Nolan recalled. "There was just an electric atmosphere in the crew when you started to perform. We did two scenes — there was a Bruce Wayne scene and a Batman scene — and I made sure that executives came down and watched what you were doing on set. Everybody was so excited by watching you perform."

But that's when Nolan got the Warner Bros. executives to think of Murphy beyond the Batman role.

"I then said to them, 'Okay, Christian Bale is Batman, but what about Cillian to play Scarecrow?' there was no dissent," he said.

"All the previous Batman villains had been played by huge movie stars: Jack Nicholson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Carrey, that kind of thing," he continued. "That was a big leap for them and it really was purely on the basis of that test. So that's how you got to play Scarecrow."

Murphy joked that his character Jonathan Crane, aka Scarecrow, was the "villain that never died" as after Batman defeated him in "Batman Begins," Crane returned for cameos in 2008's "The Dark Knight" and 2012's "The Dark Knight Rises."

"My favorite appearance of Scarecrow in the trilogy is definitely the kangaroo court scene [in 'The Dark Knight Rises'] where he's on top of that massive pile of desks," Nolan said. "I just think, in a world of anarchy, the last judge you'd want to come in front of would be Jonathan Crane."

Murphy and Nolan will next team up again for the July release of Nolan's anticipated "Oppenheimer," where Murphy will be playing the father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer.