Gotham casts Benedict Samuel as the Mad Hatter

Australian actor Benedict Samuel has been cast as Jervis Tetch/Mad Hatter, the newest DC villain to join Gotham season 3.

According to a report by Deadline, Samuel (The Walking Dead) will be playing a character whose existence was hinted at last season of Gotham when Dr. Hugo Strange and Ethel Peabody discussed the resurrection process while holding a copy of Through the Looking Glass and then quoted from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Deadline provided some more details on the character and his background:

“Jervis Tetch is a talented hypnotist teetering on the edge of madness. He arrives in Gotham with an unwavering desire to find his sister, Alice, a young woman who went missing in the city years ago. It is anyone’s guess just how far down the rabbit hole he’s willing to go in order to find her. Debuting in 1949 in Batman #49, Tetch is one of the very, very many aspects of Batman lore co-created by Bill Finger, who in 2015 was finally acknowledged by DC Comics as the official co-creator of Batman himself. Like many villains who debuted during the golden age of comics, The Mad Hatter was originally a comical figure before being reimagined as a much darker character beginning in the 1970s.”

Samuel joins other new cast members for the third season of Gotham including Maggie Geha (The Rewrite) as Poison Ivy and Jamie Chung (Once Upon a Time) as Valerie Vale.

The second season of Gotham ended with a truckload of patients from the infamous Indian Hill facility being released into the city, undoubtedly to wreak havoc and cause endless hardships for Jim Gordon, Bruce Wayne, and the rest of the GCPD. These unfortunate individuals were subjected to bizarre and horrendous experiments by Dr. Hugo Strange and have emerged from these procedures with enhanced and highly dangerous skills.

Gotham season 3 will air on September 19 on Fox.