The Penguin

By starrymag | September 19, 2024

By: Jamie Steinberg

 

 

Q) Lauren, how did you build out the world of Gotham without Batman appearing in it?

 

Lauren LeFranc: I mean for me, it’s always about creating engaging, interesting characters. I had the benefit of already having Oz Cobb, and thanks to Mike [Marino] who created this incredible prosthetic that just makes it so seamless, and what Colin already did in The Batman was amazing. But then for me, its, I think the goal is and my hope is, is that if you have interesting enough characters, complicated enough quirky, off kilter people that you want to engage with, you’re not thinking about who else I wish could be in this world with us. And that’s what I worked to do. All our writers did, and I hope we have done. And obviously, I’ve benefited tremendously from the talent that’s on this stage. I mean, Cristin, Rhenzy, and DeeDee as well. Like, they’re just so incredible in what they do. I’m so excited for people to see it.

 

Q) Mike, here’s a question that came in for you. Can you speak to crafting this now iconic look for Colin Farrell’s Penguin? What inspired your take, and did Matt Reeves or Colin have any input in it?

 

Mike Marino: Well, it first started with Matt Reeves and the moment I spoke to him for the first time, I knew he was an artist. I knew he was very similar to me personality-wise. We are very geeky, and we knew all about Batman and we knew such fans of film and all of that. So, he was trying to describe the tone of the film and the character that he wanted Oz to be, which was a sympathetic person who wanted more out of his life. Similar to John Cazale’s character in The Godfather as Fredo. So, that was a major reference. And that was a talking point between us. And I had, he mentioned some gangsters and some ‘30s gangsters, some ‘50s gangsters, mob people and I went along and had the idea of looking at birds, looking at penguins and how do I incorporate any of that type of information subliminally into this face. Because I always try to do those types of things. You know, even if it’s a very subtle aspect. So, I looked at all these birds. I found this penguin with this really powerful brow, very angled. And I took away his [overlapping comments] powerful brows, exactly. You know, you can see on every [overlapping comments] there you go, made him famous. So, I gave a little bit more of an intimidating gesture to the eyebrow and his nose, I gave this subliminal aspect of a beak and the shape of the nostril being like a bird’s mouth slightly. So, all of these things layered on top of one another created this strange new person that doesn’t exist. And when Matt saw it, he really thought it was more than he thought it would be, but loved it and said, can we test it, can we try it? And we successfully did a makeup test, and Colin was in it for the first time and the voice came out and the walk came out, and it was a very magical experience. And it’s rare to get to do that. But I think we have a show, an amazing show that Lauren wrote, and her team, and I think we’re now going to explore what he’s really like, who he is.

 

Q) What did you draw on to help prepare for this role? Did you study previous iterations of this character, and if so, what did you want to take with you or leave behind from those?

 

Colin Farrell: Somebody, I was speaking to somebody earlier and they referenced Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy and I never for a second thought of Ratso Rizzo once. But there’s no doubt that every single film I’ve seen – someone else last week said to me that having seen the first two episodes, that Oz reminded them of De Niro in The Untouchables as Al Capone. Someone else said James Gandolfini. So, it’s not an original performance apparently. What I mean is, all of them are in there. Like, I’ve seen Untouchables twice, I’ve seen Midnight Cowboy four times. Anything, as an actor, anything you ever see, any piece of music you ever hear, it all kind of meets you inside in a place that gets used, gets filtered through every single character you do in lesser or greater ways. So, there’s was nothing particular that I thought of. When I read the script first for The Batman, and I said this before, I was kind of a bit baffled as to what I could do with it or how I would look. I met Matt Reeves to talk about The Batman and I had just come off a thing called The North Water that I’d put on 50 or 60 pounds for. And he was like, oh my god, you look great, the body’s great. And I was like, well tough shit, say goodbye to it because I’m fucking, I’m dropping pounds now. I’ve got to get healthy again. I just finished being bigger for like six months. And then, of course, the technology of bodysuits. And then Matt said, have you been talking to Mike Marino, and I said, yeah. And he said, have you seen what you’re going to look like? And I said, what I’m going to look like sounds like a threatening statement almost. No, I haven’t. And Matt went, come here, come here, and he opens up his computer on his desk in London and this was about six months before we started shooting The Batman, and he said look. And I looked at this sculpt, this creation, and I, like, Matt was confused initially when he saw it. Is that going to be, who’s that? Is that going to be – I was confused by it. But I was also, I was, it spoke to me so clearly. It spoke with a sense of history, a sense of threat, a sense of violence. Also, there was kind of something sorrowful to the visage as well. It was just so complex. So, I had that, I had the script, and then I had started in with Lauren and her team of writers created it from the ground up. I mean, they took just a seedling at best, which was what we did in The Batman film. And they created this whole world of these complex characters inhabited by DeeDee as Francis and Rhenzy as Victor and Cristin [Milioti]as Sofia. And every single character she paid attention to. It’s not just The Penguin Oz show. It’s all these human beings that are so complex and multifaceted and I just knew that we were going to get to look into the engine of this guy personally in an interesting way. There was no particular reference point. Danny DeVito and I shared a few texts back and forth, but that was more taking the piss out of each other about who’s the best Penguin. It was nothing to do with – and send him pictures of action figures and shit, and yours is more accurate than mine. What’s up with that? Who did the paint job on my action figure? But nothing too serious or weighty. But the script was, the script must have been what you guys created. Did you ever add it all up? Was it 500 pages? I mean, it was a ton.

 

Q) Cristin, what was it about the dark world of The Penguin that made you want to be a part of this series?

 

Cristin Milioti: I mean, well the first thing that made me want to be a part of it was that they wanted me to be a part of it. But also, I mean, this is like the type of role that is like, you know, it’s such a like incredible dream to play because there’s so much that happens to her and she goes on such a journey. And I’m also like a very life-long Batman fan. So, I’ve been dreaming of this since I was very little. And so, like on a personal level, it was extremely surreal. And then, as an actor, I was like, oh my god, I would read each script, and I would like pinch myself when I would realize what I was going to get to do.

 

Q) Rhenzy, this is a question that came in for you. What do Oz and Victor see in each other that allows them to coexist without betraying one another? Do you view their connection as a working relationship or a friendship?

 

Rhenzy Feliz: [Or a romance] I mean, I think it’s interesting. I think that initially there’s very much like a just a survival instinct going on and like getting whatever you need to do to get to the next step. But I think it grows into something, which was one of the things I was most excited about when I was reading the scripts. I think what he sees in Oz, I think he looks up to Oz in a way. And I think he sort of finds something that he’s lost in Oz throughout, I think in the third episode you learn a little bit more about, a little bit of his history. And then I think he finds that, maybe he fills that hole in a way with Oz and with Francis. And so, I think that one of the things that I think he mostly looks up to is this very confident guy that for no reason on paper is very confident, but yet he still has it. His own body is like massive, and he’s got this charisma and he’s so confident. And so, I think that’s something that Victor even looks up to. And apart from that, there’s sort of this, there’s a power to what Oz is doing and there’s an alure to the lifestyle that he has. And as much as maybe the morality clashes with is this the things that I should be doing or shouldn’t be doing and what’s right and what’s wrong, there’s also an alure to the life that Oz lives, and the money. It’s nice to have money and it’s nice to have some power and it’s nice to have a little bit of backbone, and I think that being next to Oz, he sort of feels a little bit bigger himself even in those moments.

 

Q) Colin, how did you find that daily process? Did it change for you as the weeks and months of the shoot went on? Did you, were you able to Zen out more? How did it evolve for you?

 

Colin: Just seamless and the first application, which was about six months before The Batman film was eight hours, but there wasn’t a crew waiting to shoot. It was everyone was taking their time. The full thing wasn’t fully green lit yet. We kind of knew it was designed. They had the pieces done up. And we had someone that was doing the hair, someone that was doing the hair on the back of the hands, someone was doing the wig, someone was doing the teeth. It was a whole process with 10 or 11 artists in a sound stage in Burbank. It was one of the most magic days I’ve had in 25 years of working as an actor. I was so giddy with excitement. Like you were saying, I was like I can’t believe I’m getting done up to be The Penguin. This is mad. And it was extraordinary. And then after that, obviously, we did the film. We got it down to five hours, then four, and then with the TV show we had three hours every day. And it was magic time for me because the makeup crew are a bunch of misfits. There are just fucking the color the hair, the fucking tattoos everywhere, piercings, and the sweetest spirited people and brilliant artists across the board. I felt like the circus was in town every morning that I stepped into the makeup trailer, and we had our own trailer that was just for Penguin. No one could really come in because the last thing you want to do is have somebody come in when the nose is half on. I’d get very shy and very vulnerable if someone saw me only half prepared. I wanted to just keep the secret for myself as well. Which is why I wore the balaclava in the read through. But it was a great time for me because we’d come in, we’d have our coffee, we’d all have a hug, I’d shave, sit in the chair, and then we’d start the clock, and it was about three hours. And we’d play music, and we’d catch up with each other and then I’d hit the script, and I’d think about the scenes that were coming up. And I loved the three-hour process. It never felt like three hours. It always felt like two hours and 57 minutes, so it flew. But it was really, it was an additive experience for me. It wasn’t something that was a drag. It was never a drag. By the end of the, by two hours and 54 I’d start to get a little agitated and I’d walk out and then he’d be following me just doing the last little tip at the door.

 

Q) Did you count how many times you’ve done it?

 

Colin: What was it, 80-something?

 

Mike: Somewhere between 80 and 90 times. And some were at 2 in the morning. Some were lucky. We’d be like, oh, it’s 9 am. Great.

 

Colin: It was a whole thing, yeah.

 

Mike: So, the 2 a.m.’s were real tough because there was a timing thing and a lighting thing we had to adjust for, or whatever was going on that day. So, it was always varied. And we also had to gap the days.

 

Colin: The body was what, six or seven hours, the full body?

 

Mike: Yeah, well, what full body? But we did have to preserve, it isn’t easy. I mean, you’re putting glue all over your face every day. You’re putting your hair or taping it down and gluing it down and all this, so we had to really orchestrate with the producers how can we schedule this in the two days on, one day off, one day on, another day off. Maybe…

 

Colin: The first two weeks was rough on the face.

 

Mike: Yeah, and then we’d have to schedule doing a facial and all these things and taking a weekend and all of that. But it’s tough, so he is something else as an actor and to endure all of this and then to work all day long. And then, when everyone goes home, what happens? We peel it all off and we throw it out. And he’s hanging in with us to the very end.

 

Q) Cristin, here’s a two-part question for you. Are there any past performances, movie or TV, that particularly inspired you for Sofia, and what are you most excited for people to see when they watch Sofia?

 

Cristin: I kind of tried to stay away from things. I mean, I’m sure things influenced me without my realizing. Actually, DeeDee really helped me. At the read through, we were both like holding hands. I mean, like I’m so terrified. And she talked to me about movies you watch for courage. And I started this whole list with a couple of my friends who are also actors, where we send each other performances that not necessarily that you’re like that’s what I’m trying to do, but you’re like, look at that for courage. [inaudible comments] Yeah, I will send you that.

 

Mike: Like what?

 

Cristin: Well, you had suggested Gloria. And you’d been like, watch…

 

DeeDee [O’Connell]: Gloria got to be in the show.

 

Cristin: Yeah, and like, I had never seen that performance of hers and obviously [inaudible comments] oh my god. And obviously, every performance of hers is exquisite, but that, she’s like swinging for the fences in that. And it could really run the gamut. I watched women, I’d never seen Women on the Verge, not, sorry, Women of the…

 

Mike: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

 

Cristin: Thank you very much. Yes, and even just like, that’s so different in tone and it’s not like I was watching it being like, I’m going to take that. But I just was like, look at these, look at what you can do if you just, I don’t know, you can go for it. You can ground it, but you can also like really go for it. And so, I watched a lot of things to give me courage because I was extremely nervous and wracked with self-hatred and doubt. But, other than that. And then I think, like, what I’m most excited for people to see, I mean, I hope they like it, and I think that, you know, it’s like, it’s so nerve wracking when you really care about something. And I really care about this show, and I really care about this character in like a really vulnerable way. I really love her, and it’s been – I know it’s a very actorly thing to say, but it’s been like an enormous honor to play someone like this and I’m very protective of her and I want people to love her as much as I do. But like, I mean, if I’m like going with surface level things like running around in fur coats, firing guns is pretty baller and I would hope that people like that as much as I did. That’s like, off the top of my head.

 

Q) Rhenzy, your character was created for this series, so you didn’t have reference points to pull from. How did you find Victor, and were you a Batman fan before?

 

Rhenzy: Well yeah. To answer that last one, I was a massive Batman fan before. I grew up with the Christian Bale and the Christopher Nolan ones. So, that was the coolest thing in the world to me, Bruce Wayne and all that. But then getting to see what Matt Reeves and company did with The Batman, thought it was the coolest thing on the planet. And one of the things we share obviously is like the visual sort of language of that movie is also in our show. And I thought like the way it looks and I just thought like as an actor, like how – I always look at these movies and stuff and TV shows that look gorgeous and they’re so cool and I’m like, man, I wonder how I’d look in that screen on the frame. And I guess it’s like – the first time I’m having this thought out loud – and it feels like, and so to get that kind of opportunity to, I saw the movie and I loved the movie. And then to get to shoot the show and then see that I’m in the show that looks kind of like the movie, it was like, I don’t know, it’s just super cool. So yeah, massive fan of the movies and that growing up. But how did I find Victor? I mean so much of it’s on the page. I mean so much of it’s there to begin with and it’s beautifully written. And then to find him, I think one of the major things that helped me was when we showed it diving a little bit deeper into the stutter and figuring out the psychology behind that. And I had Marc Winski who helped me out on that. He was like my coach on, like a dialect coach I would say. I think technically it’s like a fluency coach or coordinator or something. He came on to help me with the stutter. He has stutter as well. And so, get to use him as a source for information and then obviously all the help that he gave me and on the technical aspects of it all, I think it sort of informed so much of how Victor kind of moved through life in general. I mean, it’s not everything that he is, but it shapes him majorly growing up with something like that. And so, I think that so much of it was found in diving deeper into what it must be like growing up with a stutter, and then yeah, and then everything page as well just kind of all that put together kind of made what we see.

 

Q) DeeDee, I like this question that came in for you. It’s very simple and straightforward. What are you most proud of when it comes to your work on this series?

 

DeeDee: Oh, geez. That’s simple, but no. That’s bad. That’s a bad question. Oh, geez. I really – that’s hard. I think I feel like weirdly enough, the feeling of surrender. Yeah, there was a, I mean, it’s not the thing, but it was a sensation that I haven’t always gotten to have. The piece is so theatrical. The writing is so theatrical. It’s so epic, it’s so large. I was like, you guys are talking about slightly terrified of the hugeness of it. Like, oh yeah, make her stop. And there was a way in which we had to really embrace that and not be afraid and pitch hard. But there was a, sort of like a sweet surrender that you had to do that felt very, I felt very soft a lot of the time, weirdly enough. I mean, when you look at Francis, you don’t think of a soft experience to play her, but there was a softness at the center like, okay, there’s nothing we can do but just go. And maybe it’s how pitchers feel a little bit. I mean, they’re going to pitch really hard, but there’s like a, you see them just like, just surrender. So, I think I was proud that I was able to surrender in a situation. You could feel very pressurized and very shut down. I went into it thinking to myself, if that happens to me, if I start to feel pressurized and shut down and unable to really embrace the experience of doing this, then I don’t want to do this anymore. And I came away feeling like I want to do it again, I guess.

 

Q) Lauren, how did you incorporate fandom into your creative process here? Is that something you have to think about at the forefront when you’re doing something like this?

 

Lauren: I mean, my goal is to make sure we’re honoring the stories that have come before us and then try our best to make something that feels wholly original within it. 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 and just put my own stamp on it. That was really invigorating and exciting because I grew up reading comic books and I loved them, and I always wanted to tell stories like that. And just being given the opportunity to do that on a scale like this, I wanted to make sure as a fan that I was, that a kid like me would be excited. And yet, hopefully we could draw in more people, like some people who aren’t always included normally in that kind of experience. So, really my goal was honestly just to create interesting stories to have characters that feel relatable and intriguing and repulsive at times that you want to watch and you’re not quite sure why you want to watch them. You start to think deeper about your own self in doing that. I mean, that was the goal and to get to dabble in this kind of sandbox of Gotham City and the world that Matt established in the film is just really exciting for me. So, to do justice to what’s come before, but then also to kind of break the mold and free ourselves of that was at least my goal.

 

Q) Colin, how do you manage to get out of the dark world of “The Penguin” and why do you think you turned out to be such?

 

Colin: How does Colin manage to get out of the headspace kind of thing? I mean, by the time we finished shooting the show, I was done. I was just like, it was such an honor to do this, truly, because as Cristin was saying, I was a fan of Burgess Meredith when I was six or seven years of age. I was watching Burgess Meredith all the way through Batman ’66, and then Danny DeVito in Tim Burton’s film. Just to be part of this canon was such an honor. But it was so well drawn, all the characters and their journeys were so well drawn, whether it was somebody’s ascent to power like Oz’s, it was also coinciding with his descent into madness and psychopathy, but by the end of it, I was knackered. Taking the makeup off at the end of every day was helpful. As much as the process of putting the makeup on that took two hours and 57 minutes was helpful to get me into character for the day, at the end of the day it was a 45-minute removal, and by the end of the removal, the relief after being in it for 15 hours, like, not poor me. Just being in it, it was great. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not fucking feeling sorry for myself. But the relief of that shit coming off after 15 hours at the end of every day, it was like being reborn. Every day it was like a birth. You were like being born back to yourself. It was really significant. But by the end of it I was grumpy because it’s so dark and he’s such a remorselessly cruel character by the end – I say that with affection and not judgement – that yeah, I just, I was in a bit of a funk by the end. I was glad to be done. As much as I thought in the film that Matt knows well that I wanted to do more than the five or six scenes, which I was still delighted to have, I got greedy during the film. Like, can’t we do more? I was, I think I’ve had this enough. Done enough at the end of the eight hours. But yeah, I watched Pixar films. I’d go back to my hotel room, put on “Finding Nemo.” On my life, I had to watch light stuff. I wouldn’t watch any dark material. Like, honest to God, “Finding Nemo” is the answer. I could have got that much quicker.

 

Q) It’s fascinating how we become who we are. And sometimes we credit it to our family upbringing, to the environment, to the people around us. Colin, I was wondering if you could kind of pick apart the layers of what created this man. I mean, how much would you attribute it to his family upbringing? Did you have something in your head, was it an incident in his life that kind of triggered him to a certain path?

 

Colin: I mean there’s one incident in his life that’s revealed throughout the show that was probably more consequential anything else in regards to directing him towards the man he becomes. But what led him to that incident predates the incident, of course, and it was something inside of him. He’s born with a physical limitation that was, and pardon the pun, but really emotionally crippling for him, and psychologically crippling. And he felt other in a way that wasn’t great. It wasn’t an aspirational other. He felt subjugated by his own limitation and what he was told his limitation was. He was bullied. He was treated cruelly by society. I’m not justifying any act, but more often than not, when somebody commits an act of cruelty in this human experience we all share, you will find out that they had been treated cruelly at some stage in their timeline. And so, Oz had been treated with great cruelty. Not by his mother. He’d been treated with love by his mother. But even in relation to the perfect health that both of his older brothers live in, he was kind of secondary or tertiary. His mother was, as Lauren designed and as DeeDee was touching on, his mother was the greatest influence in his life. But there was no amount of love, I think, that he could receive even from her that would have ameliorated the pain that he didn’t know how to manage within himself, and that’s something that comes out later and in this tale over eight hours comes out in all sorts of grotesquely consequential ways. But definitely, yeah, I’m a big fan of nature/nurture Darwinian. It’s all, it’s a mix of – I’ve known people that have come from broken homes and violent homes, and they’ve gone on to do the most extraordinary compassionate things in their life for themselves and their immediate family and their friends and community at whole. I’ve known people that have come from very privilege, very loving households, and they have made a dog’s dick of their lives. And they have then gone through some healing and stuff, but they’ve really hurt people, a lot of people. So, there’s nothing linear really in this experience and what it is to be a human being. But Oz certainly has a back catalog of a lot of pain and a lot of uncertainty in his past. And that was the beautiful thing about getting to do this show, was not just having something that was cool and violent and rock and roll, which at times it is cool, at times it is very violent, at times it is rock and roll. But all of the characters are kind of – nothing’s justified, but we get to have a look at why people are the way they are. And is there forgiveness and is there redemption and is there a point where you’ve gone too far. I think by the end of the show, no spoiler alerts, but Oz has gone too far and there’s no coming back. He has dropped into a certain psychological place in his life, and that’s where he belongs now. Who knows what the future holds, but yeah, it was the job that both Matt did in creating it originally and working closely with Lauren and her team of writers did in fleshing out all of these characters with the nuance that she did.

 

Q) Lauren, a question just came in about the renaming of Oz from Cobblepot to Cobb. Can you speak to that decision?

 

Lauren: Yeah, I mean it’s something that Matt and I talked about as we were developing the show that I think for him, and it’s, I think, a very valid point, Cobblepot is not a word that exists in our universe. I think it makes him very unique. I love Oz Cobblepot in the way that I’ve loved The Penguin and so many comic books and iterations of that. But 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, and so we changed it to Oz Cobb. And also, what’s kind of exciting to me about that is that this is our Penguin. Like, he’s the only one that goes by Oz Cobb. And so, again, in terms of like evolving canon, we get to do that in this way.

 

Q) Colin, Oz takes some hits throughout the series as it goes along. He already has a slight wobble to his walk. But did you increase or adjust that in any way consciously as things happen?

 

Colin: There was certain scenes where if I knew Oz was on his feet the whole day in the timeline of the show, that it might be a little bit more on certain days if you got a good night’s rest or he was around people that he was, whose judgement he feared, that he would try and do it less or certainly not be perturbed by it at all. There were moments when I’d jump off the back of a truck and I’d land on my foot, and I wanted to just get a grimace. I just wanted to always remember that there was something, that it wasn’t just the fun of being like a metronome or a pendulum and just having this thing that you could see from a distance. But the real reason why he limped the way he did was because there was an awful amount of pressure and soreness that came from that foot. And so, it was just trying to stay on top of that stuff, which again, all of these questions and things that you remind yourself of that you’re trying out onto a character, they’re just fun. They’re just adornments and they have to be grounded in the experience of whatever you’re portraying of course, but it’s all part of the jigsaw puzzle that makes the job fun.

 

 

*PRESS CONFERENCE*