The Penguin: Colin Farrell Teases "Very Dark" Batman Spinoff

By Cameron Bonomolo

The Batman ended with crime-infested Gotham City flooded by the Riddler (Paul Dano)  and ripe for the picking by mob lieutenant Oswald "Oz" Cobblepot (Colin Farrell). The world that Matt Reeves created for his dark and moody movie "is one that warrants a deeper gaze through the eyes of Oswald Cobblepot," Farrell said when announcing HBO Max spinoff series The Penguin. The DC drama explores Oz "as he rises through the darkened ranks to become the Penguin," with Farrell teasing his return to Gotham "for a little madness and a little mayhem."

Picking up immediately from where The Batman left off, the half-submerged streets of Gotham City are the setting for what Farrell described as "a very tricky, very dark story."

"The Penguin show is dark, but I've just got such license to explore in it, and such a freedom beneath the makeup," Farrell told Gold Derby in an interview for his Oscar-nominated movie The Banshees of Inisherin. "There's some kind of permission you're given to explore in a way that's hard to give yourself when it's just your visage, you know? So I'm super excited about it."

Lauren LeFranc (Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Impulse) serves as writer, executive producer, and showrunner of the series executive produced by Reeves and Dylan Clark. 

"I've read the first five of eight, and they're — without a shadow of a doubt — extraordinary scripts," Farrell said. "They're so good, man. On paper, it's f—ing great stuff." 

Farrell also praised the work of Oscar-nominated make-up artists Mike Marino and Mike Fontaine, who will compete with Naomi Donne in the Best Makeup and Hairstyling category at the 2023 Oscars.

"You'll be blown away by the make-up," Farrell said, adding that "the make-up is somehow, in a very subtle way, even better. It's just more perfected."

After fans got their first look at an "unrecognizable" Farrell in The Batman, the actor told ComicBook his dramatic Penguin transformation through prosthetics and make-up informed his performance as the classic DC Comics villain. 

"I saw Mike Marino's design for the character and there was so much going on in the face. And it's so realistic, just from looking at the design, and then I tried it on. There was the scarring, the pock-marked face," Farrell said. "There was a sadness, there was kind of an empathy that I felt when I looked at it. And Oz is somebody who can be terrifying. He has a propensity for violence. But — like the majority of human beings on the planet — inside him, there is a brokenness that Matt wanted to explore. And I think that Mike represented so much."

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Farrell continued: "So when I saw the actual makeup for the first time, the penny started to drop on what drove this man — what his life might have been like before, when he was a young man, when he was a teenager, 20s, working his way up the criminal cabal. And it did so much of the work for me, man, it really did."

Joining Farrell in The Penguin are Cristin Milioti (Made for Love), Michael Kelly (Jack Ryan), Shohreh Aghdashloo (The Expanse), Deirdre O'Connell (Outer Range), and Rhenzy Feliz (Runaways). A release date on HBO Max is TBA.

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