A Scene Featuring Bane’s Backstory Was Cut From ‘The Dark Knight Rises’

So we’ve all seen The Dark Knight Rises by now and sure some people have their gripes with the movie but I don’t think anyone will argue that it wasn’t a good movie. At 165 minutes the movie had just about everything you could ask for. Like most Hollywood movies though there were of course things that wound up on the cutting room floor. Now thanks to an interview in GQ with the film’s costume designer Lindy Hemming, we now know that there was supposed to be a scene showing more of Bane’s back-story.

…The other thing that you should have seen during that sequence is him(Bane) being injured in his youth. So one of the fundamental things about his costume is that he has this scar from the back injury. Even if he hasn’t got the bulletproof vest on, he still has to wear the waist belt and the braces. In that scene in the prison, where he’s learning to fight the same way Batman learned to fight, he’s wearing an early version of his waist belt. It’s showing support, but it’s not the finished one he eventually wears. He’s also wearing an early version of his gas mask, all glued together …If you look at the film, unless they’ve cut it—and I’m sure they haven’t—there’s a whole early section for Tom Hardy where he’s fighting and being taunted by people. He’s got chains on him, and he’s standing on a wooden thing while people are attacking him. And in that scene, he’s wearing a much more ragged, primitive version of the mask.

That sounds like a scene I’d like to have seen. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that Nolan includes it on the Blu-ray release!