“The Penguin,” which stars Oscar nominee Colin Farrell and premieres September 19 on HBO and Max, expands the world created by Matt Reeves in “The Batman” (2022).
The spin-off series takes the Caped Crusader out of the picture and follows the Penguin’s rise from mediocre gangster to iconic crime boss. If you’re expecting this version of the villain to resemble the many DC Comics-inspired versions that have come before, you’re mistaken.
The Penguin first appeared on the panel pages of DC Comics in 1941, and since then the character created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger has been brought to life in many different ways.
Burgess Meredith played the top-hatted villain in the classic Batman television series in the ’60s. In the ’90s, Oswald Cobblepot got a gothic update in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, thanks to Danny DeVito’s deformed, whiny portrayal of the crime boss. Robin Lord Taylor brought the Penguin down to normal in a down-to-earth but wacky portrayal in Fox’s prequel series Gotham, which launched in 2014. And in the new animated series Batman: The Caped Crusader, the Penguin’s gender is swapped, with Minnie Driver stepping in to voice the formidable Oswalda Cobblepot.
Each version offers a new, entertaining facet of the complex villain. But Farrell’s haunting portrayal of the Penguin breaks all expectations, bringing a tortured, relentless edge to the role. The result is a performance inspired by The Godfather, Robert De Niro’s Al Capone from All the President’s Men, and Tony Soprano.
Farrell’s performance brings out an emotionality that sets this Penguin apart. He’s likable but murderous; he’s calculating but crazy. Ultimately, he’s a power-hungry outsider with a penchant for violence and something he wants to prove – and despite all these nuances, the audience is behind him.
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CNET attended a press day for the series, where show creator Lauren LeFranc, makeup artist Mike Marino and cast members Farrell and co-stars Cristin Miliotti (who plays Sofia Falcone), Deirdre O’Connell (who plays Francis Cobb) and Rhenzy Feliz (who plays Victor Aguilar) delved into the inner workings of the show to show how different this Penguin is from anything we’ve seen before.
Design a unique narrative path
Unlike his Cobblepot predecessors, this penguin has a unique name: Oz Cobb. There is a change in tone in the story being told. As LeFranc explains, this was all intentional.
“Cobblepot is a word that doesn’t exist in our universe,” she said. “I think for our show, because we’re very grounded, we wanted it to feel more realistic. It made a lot of sense to give him a name that exists in our world. So we changed it to Oz Cobb. The exciting thing about it to me is that this is our penguin. He’s the only one named Oz Cobb.”
You could say that there is a devil and an angel sitting on the Penguin’s shoulder. Oz’s relentless journey to the top is shaped by the mentor role he takes on for the young Victor (Feliz). The growing bond between the two reveals the empathetic side of the crime boss and is reminiscent of the contradictory dynamic between Walter White and Jessie Pinkman in Breaking Bad.
Sofia Falcone’s energy, on the other hand, is chaotic evil. The treacherous decisions Oz makes throughout the series are directly influenced by her return to Gotham. Their volatile partnership sets the stage for plenty of intrigue – and backstabbing.
LeFranc made a point of honoring the established Batman story, but at the same time found new and exciting ways to expand or break conventions.
“My goal is to make sure we honor the stories that have come before us and then do our best to create something that feels completely original within that,” she said. “I think what I’ve been most excited about, honestly, is creating a new canon and being able to create new characters or develop the characters in a different way – just, you know, put my own stamp on it.”
An immersive transformation
The only thing everyone’s talking about here is Colin Farrell’s amazing transformation. Prosthetic makeup designer Mike Marino admitted he had a lot of work to do when he joined the project. His inspiration came from birds – and he looked at a lot of them. And a particularly angry-looking penguin he found, frowning and all, inspired him to design Oz Cobb’s face.
“I introduced this subtle aspect of a beak in the shape of the nostril, which is slightly reminiscent of a bird’s mouth,” he said. “All of these things layered on top of each other created this strange new person that doesn’t exist.”
Farrell revealed that the makeup process took about three hours each day. Seeing his face change in the reflection in front of him helped him get into character. Still, it was a really disturbing experience.
“I looked in the mirror and it was like those YouTube videos where cats see themselves in the mirror for the first time and recoil,” he said. “I mean, when you look at your reflection and it’s not what you’ve seen for 45 years? That’s really, really haunting. And so I just went with it.”
To complete the look, Marino’s team built Farrell a suit that he compared to “a giant snowsuit.” The entire set had to be kept at freezing temperatures to ensure the makeup stayed intact and didn’t run or melt. Between takes, Farrell locked himself in a zipped enclosure that Marino described as a “freezing igloo,” where he passed the time and focused on keeping his costume and makeup intact.
“But by the end I was completely worn out,” Farrell admitted. “The relief of getting away from that shit for 15 hours at the end of every day was like a rebirth. It was like coming back to yourself. It was really meaningful and by the end I was devastated. It’s so dark and he’s such a relentlessly cruel character. I say that with affection, not condemnation, and I’m just glad it’s over.”
Complex female characters
Cristin Miliotti as Sofia Falcone.
LeFranc had a specific narrative goal in making The Penguin: to bring more complicated, flawed female characters to Gotham. Because, as she recalls, the characters she envisioned as a young comic book fan were those played by men.
“I found them more interesting and I think that was partly because they were given more interesting stories to back them up with,” she said.
“That was something I wanted to develop as much as I could. I wanted to reach for that younger version of myself, so to speak. I think we all need to see more complicated people on screen in general, people with more flaws. So that was really my goal with that, and making sure that we give every single character on our show the same amount of backstory and the same amount of complicated trauma in certain moments, and who they are is an analysis of that.”
Farrell’s Oz may be a larger-than-life character in his own right, but thanks to Deirdre O’Connell’s performance as his troubled mother Francis and Cristin Milioti’s equally troubled Sofia Falcone, the world of The Penguin evolves into a complex exploration of trauma and retribution amidst a violent criminal underworld.
In fact, it is much more reminiscent of “The Sopranos” than anything DC Comics has brought to the screen so far.
