Former Mad Man Vincent Kartheiser sells Titans on playing Scarecrow in Season 3

Vincent Kartheiser is set to play another mad man. The actor best known for playing the ambitious account man Pete Campbell in the AMC series Mad Men has been cast as Jonathan Crane, aka Scarecrow, in the third season of Titans. 

A report from The Wrap details that in the HBO Max series, gone are the days of Crane's terrorizing Batman and the residents of Gotham City with his homemade brew of fear toxins. Now, he's an inmate in Arkham Asylum, and according to executive producer Greg Walker, he now moonlights as a profiler for the GCPD while serving his time.

Crane is one of three new characters that Titans will introduce in its third season, the other two being Gotham police commissioner Barbara Gordon (Savannah Welch) and Tim Drake, aka the third Robin (Jay Lycurgo). Season 3 will also have Jason Todd (Curran Walters), aka the second Robin, don the mantle of Red Hood and serve as the season’s primary antagonist. 

As Scarecrow, Crane created and used toxins on his victims to show them their worst fears. The DC Comics villain was previously played in live action by Cillian Murphy in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight film trilogy and Charlie Tahan on the TV series Gotham.

As previously reported, Walker said at DC FanDome in August that the upcoming third season will tell a story of the "second generation coming up. We have Nightwing and Barbara Gordon trying to deal with the mistakes of their parents, and it turns out to be a lot more difficult than anybody thought."

Now, we don’t want to be too judgmental before production has even begun, but wouldn’t trusting Scarecrow be a pretty big mistake? Though, hey, maybe distrusting Dr. Crane in the first place was the original sin. Who knows? We shall see.

The first two seasons of Titans are available to stream on HBO Max.