How The Dark Knight Rises Star Marion Cotillard Feels About Her Controversial Death Scene

Since Tim Burton’s “Batman” arrived in 1989, there’s been no shortage of just plain silly moments throughout the franchise’s run. The introduction of the bat-nipples in “Batman Forever,” George Clooney’s Dark Knight whipping out the Bat credit card, anything Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze did in “Batman & Robin.” Following that 1997 blunder, however, Christopher Nolan took over the property, giving Batman a new origin story and single-handedly introducing the concept of the “gritty reboot” into the popular lexicon.

2005’s “Batman Begins” was an impressively fresh take on a character that had already been reinterpreted multiple times, both on-screen and in the comics. It introduced us to what was dubbed a “grounded” Batman, situating the hero in a Gotham that felt much closer to our own world than any Bat-movie before it. It was a hero’s origin tale that Nolan quickly followed up with the Bat-equivalent of “Heat,” placing Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne at the center of a crime thriller with 2008’s “The Dark Knight.” With both of these movies, you’d be hard pressed to identify any misstep of the sort I mentioned earlier. Nolan had a unique vision for both movies that just worked on-screen.

But for the last movie in his “Dark Knight” trilogy, the director decided to go bigger in terms of scale, crafting a war epic that saw Gotham plunged into tumult as Tom Hardy’s Bane attempted a revolution in Batman’s hometown. There is a lot wrong with 2012’s “The Dark Knight Rises,” though I think it holds up better than you might remember. One inescapable low-point of the movie, however, comes when Marion Cotillard’s Miranda Tate/Talia al Ghul, expires in the front seat of a truck in the most overwrought, melodramatic way possible. Ever since, fans have relentlessly mocked the moment in question, wondering how a director of Nolan’s caliber could have called cut on that take and gone home happy.

Now, Cotillard herself has weighed in this important debacle, admitting that she may have had finer moments on-screen.

At the end of “The Dark Knight Rises,” Bruce Wayne has returned to Gotham following his abduction by Bane, and sets out to put a stop to his and Talia al Ghul’s scheme to blow up Gotham with a nuclear device (a plot that was another misstep for Christopher Nolan’s previously grounded take on the Dark Knight). After Batman chases down Talia’s truck with his aircraft, simply called “The Bat,” the vehicle careens off an overpass and into the tunnel below. Miranda is then discovered in the front seat, contorted by the impact in an unintentionally comical way. She then announces that her father’s work is complete and passes awy in a manner that was more than a little hammy. Something about the unintentionally hilarious position in which she’s found and this overwrought death made the scene one of the more ridiculous in “The Dark Knight Rises,” and it seems Cotillard herself agrees.

Speaking to French outlet Les rencontres du Papotin (via Variety), the actor admitted, “I didn’t nail that scene. I didn’t find the right position. I didn’t find the right way. I was stressed. Sometimes it happens that you screw something up. So that, I screwed up.”

Cotillard isn’t exactly known for overacting, and is otherwise well-respected for her talents. She won an Oscar for playing singer Édith Piaf in 2007’s “La Vie en Rose” and was nominated again in 2015 for her turn in “Two Days, One Night.” She also delivered a great performance in the well-reviewed “Annette” in 2021 — about which Cotillard spoke to /Film, explaining how she focused on the dark side of her character. Such reflective and thoughtful work is characteristic of the French performer, and as such Talia’s death seemed jarringly atypical. That might be part of why Cotillard feels just as strongly as fans about her “Rises” performance. After all, this wasn’t the first time she addressed the now infamous death scene.

In 2016, Marion Cotillard spoke to Allociné, where she admitted that “sometimes there are failures,” adding:

“When you see this on screen, you’re thinking: ‘Why? Why did they keep that take?’ But either you blame everyone or nobody. But I thought people overreacted because it was tough to be identified just with this scene. When I’m doing the best I can to find the authenticity in every character that I’m playing, it’s tough to be known just for this scene.”

In fairness, because “The Dark Knight Rises” faced so much in the way of criticism, Cotillard’s performance in this one moment was given more attention by aggrieved fans that it perhaps deserved. The actor otherwise delivered a solid performance in a film that had a lot more going for it than it typically gets credit for.

While Christopher Nolan’s other two Batman movies are superior, “Rises” was arguably the most ambitious superhero movie ever made — one which certainly delivered on spectacle, even if its storytelling left much to be desired. Nolan similarly took his commitment to rendering dramatic set-pieces in-camera to the ultimate extreme with the opening scene of “Rises,” which saw him actually attach one plane to another in mid-air. He might have paid a little less attention to mid-air spectacles and more attention to choosing a different take for Talia al Ghul’s death, but the man was making a hugely challenging war epic. As such, Cotillard is surely right to urge fans to move on from her lamentable acting misstep.