Colin Farrell's Penguin Ain't Your Granddad's Version of the Batman Villain

The Penguin, which stars Academy Award nominee Colin Farrell and is set to premiere Sept. 19 on HBO and Max, expands the world Matt Reeves created in 2022's The Batman. 

The spin-off series takes the Caped Crusader out of the picture and follows the rise of the Penguin from midlevel thug to iconic crime overlord. If you're expecting this version of the villain to be similar to the many DC Comics-inspired iterations that came before it, you've got another thing coming.

The Penguin first hit DC Comics' paneled pages in 1941, and since then the character, created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, has been brought to life in a multitude of manners. 

Burgess Meredith played the top hat-wearing villain in the classic Batman television series in the '60s. Then Oswald Cobblepot got a gothic update in the '90s in Tim Burton's Batman Returns, thanks to Danny DeVito's deformed, sniveling portrayal of the crime boss. Robin Lord Taylor brought the Penguin down to size in a grounded yet unhinged performance in Fox's prequel series Gotham, which kicked off in 2014. And in the new animated release Batman: The Caped Crusader, the Penguin is gender-swapped, with Minnie Driver stepping in to voice the formidable Oswalda Cobblepot. 

Each version offers a fun new layer to the complex villain. But Farrell's immersive performance as the Penguin disrupts expectations, bringing a tortured, relentless flavor to the role. The result is a performance that takes inspiration from The Godfather, Robert De Niro's Al Capone from The Untouchables, and Tony Soprano.

There's an emotionality that comes through in Farrell's performance that sets this Penguin apart. He's sympathetic, but homicidal; he's calculated, but unhinged. Ultimately, he's a power-hungry underdog with a knack for violence and something to prove -- and through all the nuance, the audience has his back. 

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CNET attended an in-person press day for the series, where show creator Lauren LeFranc, makeup designer 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) dug into the program's inner workings to show how this Penguin is unlike any we've seen before.

Charting a unique narrative path

Unlike his Cobblepot predecessors, this Penguin goes by a unique name: Oz Cobb. There's a tonal shift in the story being told. As LeFranc explains, it was all by design.

"Cobblepot is not a word that exists in our universe," she said. "I think, for our show, the fact that we're very grounded, it should feel more real world. It made a lot of sense to give him a name that does exist in our world. So we changed it to Oz Cobb. What's exciting to me about that is that this is our Penguin. He's the only one who goes by Oz Cobb."

One could say there's a devil and angel on the Penguin's shoulder. Oz's unrelenting journey to the top is informed by the mentorship role he takes on with young Victor (Feliz). The growing bond between the two reveals the crime boss' empathetic side and is reminiscent of the conflicted dynamic between Walter White and Jessie Pinkman in Breaking Bad.

Sofia Falcone's energy, on the other hand, is chaotic evil. The insidious choices Oz makes throughout the series are directly informed by her return to Gotham. Their volatile partnership sets the stage for a load of backstabbing -- and front-stabbing -- to occur.

LeFranc paid close attention to honoring established Batman lore while finding new and exciting ways to expand or break the mold.

"My goal is to make sure we're honoring the stories that have come before us and then do our best to make something that feels totally original within it," she said. "I think the thing that I was most excited about, honestly, is to create new canon, and to be able to create new characters or to evolve the characters in a different way -- to just, you know, put my own stamp on it." 

An immersive transformation

The one thing everyone is talking about here is Colin Farrell's astounding transformation. Prosthetic makeup designer Mike Marino admitted he had his work cut out for him when he joined the project. His inspiration began with birds -- and he looked at a lot of them. And a particularly angry-looking penguin he found, furrowed brow and all, sparked the creation of Oz Cobb's face.

"I gave this subliminal aspect of a beak in the shape of the nostril being like a bird's mouth, slightly," he said. "All these things layered on top of one another created this strange new person that doesn't exist."

Farrell revealed that the daily makeup application process took roughly three hours. Watching his face change in the reflection in front of him helped him get into character. Still, it was a genuinely disturbing experience. 

"I looked in the mirror, and it was like those YouTube videos you see of cats seeing themselves in the mirror for the first time, and they recoil," he said. "I mean, looking back at your reflection, and it's not what you have seen for 45 years? It's really, really powerful. And so I just gave myself over to that."

To complete the look, Marino's team built Farrell a suit, which he compared to "a gigantic snowsuit." The entire set had to be kept at a frigid temperature to maintain the makeup's integrity and keep it from running or melting. Farrell would sequester himself in between takes inside a zipped-up enclosure, which Marino called "a freezing igloo," where he would pass the time and focus on keeping his costume and makeup intact.

"But by the end of it, I was knackered," Farrell admitted. "The relief of that shit coming off 15 hours at the end of every day was like being reborn. You were like being born back to yourself. It was really significant, and by the end of it, I was broken. It's so dark, and he's such a remorselessly cruel character. I say that with affection and not judgment, and I'm just glad to be done."

Complex female characters

Cristin Miliotti as Sofia Falcone.

LeFranc went into making The Penguin with a specific storytelling goal: to bring more complicated, flawed female characters to Gotham. Because, as she recalls, when she was a young comic book fan, the characters she imagined herself to be were the ones played by men.

"I found them more interesting, and I think, in part, it's because they were given more interesting stories as backgrounds," she said. 

"That was something to me that I wanted to try my best to evolve. I wanted to kind of reach that younger version of myself. I think we all, universally, should have more complicated people on screen, more flawed people on screen. So, that was really my goal in doing that and making sure that we're just affording every single character on our show the same amount of backstory, the same amount of complicated trauma in certain moments, and who they are is a dissection of that."

Farrell's Oz may be a larger-than-life figure on his own, but thanks to the performances of Deirdre O'Connell as his troubled mother, Francis, and Cristin Milioti's equally troubled Sofia Falcone, the world of The Penguin blossoms into a layered exploration of trauma and retribution amid a violent criminal underworld. 

In fact, it feels way more in line with The Sopranos than anything DC Comics has brought to the small screen.