Colin Farrell on The Penguin, IMDb’s most popular show globally

The fifth episode of The Penguin is now on Showmax (and on M-Net at 9pm today) and it’s already appointment viewing. HBO’s latest hit is at #1 on IMDb’s Most Popular TV chart, with an 8.8/10 rating – the highest in their top 10. It’s also at #85 on IMDb’s Top-Rated TV Of All-Time chart. 

Following the events of The Batman, Oz Cobb, AKA the Penguin, makes a play to seize the reins of Gotham’s crime world.

Directed by Emmy nominee Craig Zobel (Mare of Easttown), The Penguin co-stars an unrecognisable Colin Farrell as The Penguin, with Critics Choice Super Award winner Cristin Milioti (Palm Springs, Made for Love, Fargo) as Sofia Falcone and Rhenzy Felix (Encanto, The Runaways) as Victor Aguilar. 

Executive produced by The Batman director Matt Reeves, The Penguin has a 94% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with The Guardian giving it five stars and saying, “Colin Farrell deserves all the awards… The Irish actor is a revelation in a series that’s so twisty it leaves you breathless.”

We caught up with Farrell to find out more about his remarkable transformation, which you can see in the video below: 

Is that really you in The Batman and The Penguin? You’re completely unrecognisable. 

I was so fascinated and overwhelmingly impressed by the brilliance of what Mike Marino designed for The Penguin in The Batman. I’d never done anything with prosthetics. I’ve had a little cut here and there through the years, or a swollen knuckle, or some little gelatin piece put on me, but I’d never been totally consumed by, buried beneath this overhaul.

Mike had conversations with Matt Reeves, when Matt was about to embark on directing The Batman, about this Penguin character Oz Cobb, and who he was, and what his psychological state was, and what his ambitions were. Then Mike went off, and he designed this visage and sculpted this bust based on a cast that he did of me. I had no idea what it was going to look like.

I ended up in an office in London a few months before we were going to shoot The Batman, and I’ll never forget Matt saying to me, ‘Have you been talking to Marino? Did you see what he did? Did you see what you’re gonna look like?’ Even that line, I’ll never forget it. ‘Did you see what you’re gonna look like?’ It had a power to it. And he opened up this Macbook Air and he went, ‘Look!’ There was a picture of the 3D bust, and I malfunctioned. I went, ‘Wait a second. I’m gonna look like that?’ He went, ‘Yeah, Marino thinks he can do it. It’s gonna be a bit of time in the morning. But what do you think?’ And I went, ‘It’s f**king beautiful.’

There was a whole history of a human being on this face. There was a scar. There were the pockmarks, the remnants of teenage acne. There was a harshness and a sense of tragedy to it. I was just overwhelmed by what I was seeing. 

I had been struggling with the six or seven scenes that I had in the script for The Batman. They were all really good – Matt’s an amazing writer – but I just didn’t feel like I had any inspired thoughts on how I could inhabit the character or this world. But as soon as I saw it, this new wave of excitement overcame me. The character spoke to me in much clearer terms, and a whole world of possibility that my imagination wouldn’t have been strong enough to concoct opened.

When I looked in the mirror as Oz, there was no me looking back. My eyes were there, but everything else was just overwhelmingly different. Just other. You look in the mirror and you might have a beard or a moustache, or an eye-patch, but you’re looking back at you. With this, I was nowhere to be found. I’ve truly never felt less ownership of a character I played than I do with this. 

When Matt said, ‘It’s gonna be a bit of time in the morning’, how much was he underplaying what you were in for? 

I was there for 14 hours a day. I’d have three hours in the morning. I would shave every morning. Then they would clean my face. Then they would put a pre-seal on it. Then they would put glue on the pre-seal. Then they would put the pieces on; there were seven or eight pieces in total. Then they would put a bald cap and put a wig on top of the bald cap, and then they would get into the body shop part, which was spraying with a spray gun. And they would spray all the different facial features and discolorations, pock marks and scar, and all that kind of stuff.

I loved the makeup crew. We had our own little truck. We’d play music and we’d have a laugh. And I’d read my lines, maybe have a bit of a nap. They were an amazing team of artists. 

I had a cooling tent because the body suit was very hot, the makeup was hot, and we had to protect it and preserve it as best as possible. I realised I must have spent anywhere between 300 and 500 hours in the tent, just staring into space. Every time they said, ‘Cut,’ boom, gone, zip, tent. I would just sit in the cooling tent on my own, staring into space.

Some days, after 12 hours, a few little air bubbles would begin to show. [The team] would push them down. Every now and then they have to pin-prick an air bubble to let the trapped air out and smooth it down. 

They were just incredible artists, and it was so tactile. In a world of CGI and VFX and AI, it was all hands on. Sometimes [I’d] have to step away for 20 minutes and they’d have to do a little repair work, but the makeup had extraordinary durability to it.

What’s it like acting underneath all those prosthetics? 

It’s incredibly liberating. There’s a power to it. You feel protected. I could be having a really bad day, and nobody would know. It was basically mask work. 

I would find it hard, I think, to even give myself permission to be as vulnerable and decrepit and narcissistic and psychopathic, if I didn’t have the bells and whistles of being completely hidden behind this mask. 

I remember the first time we did a makeup test before The Batman, going into a changing room after they put the makeup on, and looking at myself and seeing what expressions did what to the makeup, and trying to see how to animate it. 

I just realised, if I gave the exact same performance without the makeup it would just be hammy, and over-the-top and unthreatening. But the mix of whatever I was doing beneath it and the sense of tragic wrath that Oz carries himself through the world with, it just seemed to work. The face just moved beautifully, and it was almost an alchemy.

Talk us through The Penguin’s trademark walk, or rather, his waddle. 

Sometimes it’s more pronounced than other times. His foot would have been sorer at the end of a day. There’s the one scene where he goes to the bed, and he takes off the sock, and you see what he lives with, what he’s been contending with all his life, and it’s painful, and he’s used to the pain, so he doesn’t grimace every time he plants his right foot down. But it is a painful thing, and it gets more sore when it’s cold out. It gets more sore at the end of a long day when he’s on his feet, and all that kind of stuff. 

So much of it just was a feeling that I had in how this guy would move. The limp wasn’t something that I was told to do; I was trying to figure out what that was. I had the idea of the foot brace. I had thought initially that maybe he had polio as a child, and they didn’t have the money for medication, and so his right leg was a little shorter, and then we went in a different direction – that it was actually an issue with his foot, that he was born with a somewhat deformed crippling of his right foot.

Did you stay in character as Oz? 

I’m not someone that stays in character all day; I’m someone that stays close to the energy of whatever the scenes we’re shooting are that day. But this one was all so encompassing. I waddled around a lot. I spoke in character quite a good bit more than usual. Some of the crew came up to me and they were like, ‘It’d be nice to meet you someday.’ And I knew exactly what they were saying. Because I would pretty much get there three hours before crew call and I would leave an hour after everyone finished. So, nobody saw me. So, it was weird. I used to leave messages for friends when I was bored in my cold trailer, and messages for my kids. You know, ‘How ya doin’, kid? Oz here, I’m just in Gotham today.’ It was fun.

The process of doing it became more and more taxing as the episodes descended into Oz’s psychology. Because it really feels like a descent rather than an ascension into power, a descent into the kind of poison of human psychology. By the end of it, I was ready to be done because I couldn’t get away from it.

Watch the mid-season trailer

Watch The Penguin on Showmax and M-Net, with new episodes on Mondays:

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