Kevin Conroy didn’t grow up reading comics. He grew up in a turbulent Irish Catholic household in Connecticut with an alcoholic father who once attempted suicide while Conroy was in high school. He escaped into acting, earned a full scholarship to Juilliard at 17 years old, and roomed with Robin Williams during his time there. After graduating, he worked in theater, soap operas, and guest spots on shows like Cheers and Murphy Brown. None of it stuck the way he hoped.

Then in 1991, casting director Andrea Romano was searching for someone to voice Batman in a new animated series. She went through hundreds of auditions. Conroy walked in and did something no one had done before: he used two completely different voices for Batman and Bruce Wayne. His inspiration was the 1934 film The Scarlet Pimpernel, where the lead hides behind a charming facade. Conroy made Bruce Wayne light and disarming and Batman deep and dangerous. The producers loved the concept but asked him to narrow the gap so it felt more subtle. That adjustment became the definitive Batman voice for an entire generation.

He played Batman for 30 years. Over 400 episodes of television, 15 films, two dozen video games including the Batman: Arkham series, and he voiced the character more times than any other actor in Batman’s 80-year history. Mark Hamill, who played his Joker for decades, said after Conroy’s passing in November 2022: “He was one of my favorite people on the planet, and I loved him like a brother.”

Here’s a detail most fans don’t know. Andrea Romano, the voice director on Batman: The Animated Series, insisted on recording the actors together in the same room whenever possible. Most animated shows record actors separately to save time and scheduling hassle. Romano came from a theater background and believed that actors needed to feed off each other to give their best performances. Conroy and Hamill recorded their Batman and Joker scenes together, playing off each other in real time. That chemistry you feel when you watch those episodes? It’s because two actors were standing in the same room, reacting to each other, the way theater actors do on stage. That creative decision is a huge part of why Batman: The Animated Series still sounds better than almost any animated show made since.

Conroy was also a gay man who grew up hiding that part of himself in a devoutly religious family during the 1980s AIDS epidemic, losing friends constantly. He wrote about it in a 2022 autobiographical comic called Finding Batman, where he reflected on how concealing parts of himself for decades prepared him to play a character whose entire existence depends on maintaining a double life. The voice that came out of him for Batman, he wrote, “seemed to roar from 30 years of frustration, confusion, denial, love, yearning.” That’s not just acting. That’s a human being pouring their actual life into a character. And that’s why the performance is irreplaceable.