Nicolas Winding Refn Wants To Direct Batgirl

Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish filmmaker behind Drive and Only God Forgives, has revealed the DC character he would love to bring to the big screen.

“I would love to do Batgirl….because Wonder Woman is done, that one I thought was super heavy,” the director has shared with Deadline.

This is the DC superheroine who appears alongside Gotham City’s protector, Batman and debuted in Batman #139 in 1961. The alias has been taken up by four secret identities so far, Betty Kane, Barbara Gordon, Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown.

Actress Yvonne Craig was the first to play the character (Barbara Gordon) in the 1966 television season of Batman. Batgirl’s first live-action feature appearance was in Joel Schaumer’s 1997 film Batman and Robin, where she was played by Clueless star Alicia Silverstone. The last feature appearance of the character was in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, played by Hannah Gunn.

Leslie Grace was set to take on the role in a self-titled film directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, which was eventually dropped from distribution.

Now, Refn has his heart set on leading another Batgirl picture due to an appreciation for the aesthetics, some even alluding to his standalone features, stating he loves “The costumes, I love the aesthetics. A lot of Her Private Hell [the director’s latest film] is my obsession with dolls, objects and how to move people around in space and time.”

“I loved the objectification of objects, and superheroes and comic books and that whole subculture,” the filmmaker added. “It’s where I come from. I collect Japanese toys, I play with Legos…”

However, he has stated he wants any take he gets to engage with on the character to be his own as he doesn’t “know if [he’ll] make an actual IP.”

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Refn’s 11th directorial feature, Her Private Hell, is a sci-fi horror flick which has just seen its 2026 Cannes Film Festival debut and is set to be theatrically released by NEON on 24th July. The film stars Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth, Dougray Scott, Diego Calva, Shioli Kutsuna, Aoi Yamada and Hidetoshi Nishijima and focuses on a young woman searching for her father while an American GI plots to rescue his daughter from Hell.

MUBI will release Her Private Hell in the UK later this year, with a US release set for July 24th.

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Ros Tibbs

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Ros is a film and lit graduate writing news and reviews at The People's Magazine. She also writes long-form film theory, film history, analytical or curated recommendations pieces on other platforms.

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