Before he became the dashing Scottish Highlander fighting off the British in Outlander, Sam Heughan was battling villains in Gotham as Batman in Batman Live!; a live-action show, touring arenas around the British Isles. Making its debut on July 19, 2011 in Manchester the show toured through England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, and finally to North America in the summer of 2012 where it made its last stop in Dallas, Texas during the winter of the same year.
To audition for the role was quite intensive. “We had lots of various rounds of auditions,” he said in an interview with Herocomplex. “We had a fight day where we had to do a lot of different fighting. And the Warner Bros. and DC Comics,

they came over to the U.K. and held auditions as well. And then they took us to a flying school where we had to be hoisted up in the air to see if we were scared or if we’d be sick, and if you passed that, you had the job. From there, we went straight into rehearsals. We had two weeks of sort of Batman boot camp were we got taught various martial arts and got everyone on the same level.” The cast was made up of 20 acrobats and 23 actors.