Why Gil Perez-Abraham as Officer Martinez in The Batman is important

Gil Perez-Abraham plays a small but important role in the Warner Bros.’ Matt Reeve’s film The Batman. The Batman stars Robert Pattinson in the titular dual role of Gotham City’s vigilante, Batman, and his alter ego, Bruce Wayne. Gil Perez-Abraham plays Officer Martinez, a Gotham police officer who serves as the voice of the average Gotham citizen and works alongside the caped crusader.

This article may contain small spoilers for The Batman. 

Why Gil Perez-Abraham’s role in The Batman is important

Initially, Officer Martinez is apprehensive about allowing someone who is not a member of law enforcement and walks around in a weird costume to work on sensitive crime scenes. Martinez and Batman are eventually able to join forces to help protect the people of Gotham. Gil Perez-Abraham’s role as “Officer Martinez” in The Batman may seem like a small role in comparison to some of the bigger and more well-known DC Comics characters like The Penguin, Detective Gordon, and Selina Kyle, but it really isn’t.

Officer Martinez serves as the voice of the average Gotham citizen. Batman fans understand that Gotham City is a scary place, and the people of Gotham are terrorized by villains, like The Riddler. However, we don’t always get a look into how the citizens of Gotham City or an average officer of the Gotham Police Department feel about him.

Officer Martinez’s journey from being suspicious of Batman to eventually understanding why Batman does what he does is what makes the film more relatable. Officer Martinez has real reactions to being presented with strange circumstances. This is what grounds the movie in realism. Because although we can’t all relate to a billionaire like Bruce Wayne or his vigilante alter ego, we can relate to the little guy. The ordinary person who is saying “Wait a second… what is going on?” 

Matt Reeve’s Vision for The Batman

Matt Reeves has stated that he was thrilled by the idea of taking Batman back to his earliest roots. “Batman started as a detective,” says Reeves, “so, to find a way to go back to that, to strip away the fantasy aspect of a DC Super Hero but to still have him be aspirational, was a really exciting idea. I always find that, with genre work, the important thing for me is to find a personal avenue in, and Batman stories allow that. We wanted to make him someone whose real superpower is that he will endure anything to do what he has to do.”

Seeing Batman as a detective, working alongside the Gotham Police department, gives us a better look at what the people of Gotham are really enduring. It brings our vigilante closer to the real issues that prevent Gotham from moving towards a better tomorrow. “I wanted to start not with an origin story, but with a young Batman—to see the arc of him pushing to become better,” Reeves adds. “So, we’ve taken that Batman and are having him solve a mystery in such a way that is not an origin tale, but refers to his origins, shaking him to his core.” At the core of the character is the fact that, according to Reeves, “he connects to people because of the suit, the car, the gadgets, he’s super cool… But he’s not really a superhero; under all of it, he’s a human being and he’s driven to try and make sense of that human side of him.”

Officer Martinez is a reflection of what we as the audience are probably thinking. If we were in this situation, then what would we think? We understand that these films provide a kind of fantasy and escapism. As audience members, we know that a character like Batman works great on screen and in comics but wouldn’t necessarily translate well in real life. There does need to be some sense of connection and relatability. Gil Perez-Abraham as Officer Martinez gives us that.

The Importance of on-screen representation

The role of Officer Martinez is also important when it comes to on-screen representation. In a recent interview, Perez-Abraham talked with us about how, as a first-generation American seeing yourself on screen has a major impact on you. 

Perez-Abraham states “What would I have thought if I had watched a movie and a guy who had so much to do in Gotham looked just like me. So I feel like I’m going to feel that. There’s going to be people who who watch Jayme [Jayme Lawson] who will feel that. There’s going to be people who watched Zoë [Zoë Kravitz] who feel that. There’s going to be people who watch Jeffrey [Jeffrey Wright] who feel that. At the end of the day I think we can conclude this is probably the first time, truly, that Gotham feels like what Gotham would feel like. Like representative wise, like, Gotham is based off of these very big multicultural cities, so to have all of us present in the project and see that, I think it’s part of what makes the movie special”

Perez-Abraham goes on to say “Because it’s not contrived, right, everybody is there for a reason and people are doing their job to the best of their abilities. I think it’s really really beautiful, And I think it’s going to be special and it’s going to Inspire people. Especially in this time period right now. We needed to see something like this moving forward.”

The film is set to open in theaters in North America on March 4, 2022.