‘The Penguin’ Drops Midseason Trailer as Colin Farrell, Cristin Milioti and Showrunner Dig Into Character Motivations
The Penguin star and executive producer Colin Farrell was joined on Thursday at New York Comic Con for a mid-season discussion by showrunner and fellow EP Lauren LeFranc, as well as co-stars Cristin Milioti, Rhenzy Feliz, Deirdre O’Connell, Michael Kelly, and Clancy Brown, where they debuted two sneak peaks for the crowd for episode five, before going in-depth on what’s motivating the characters.
In the first clip, Oz (Farrell) and Victor (Feliz) share a sentimental moment where they discuss their relationship loyalty, while Oz’s car burns in the background. “It’s you and me now, kid until the end,” Oz says, before he and his henchman make a surprise visit to rough up Sal’s (Brown) son, before paying him and his wife a visit in prison to set up an exchange.
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During the second clip, Sofia (Milioti) has Johnny (Kelly) chained up in a cold, cavernous room, where she douses him with ice cold water and teases him with the idea of warmth when he refuses to hand over information. After asking him if he wants to die there in the dark, Johnny begins to reveal truths about her parents, including an attempt by her mother to leave her father before coming back for her children. Johnny also pleads with her to use him to get her the respect she needs to make her next move as a criminal leader.
Meanwhile, Oz is seen rallying his troops, before asking Victor to protect his mother as they plan to make their next move against the Maronis. But when Victor comes to her house, he finds a mess and seemingly no one there, until he opens a bedroom door to find Mrs. Cobb (Deirdre O’Connell) in her room, cooped up like a pack rat and mistaking Victor as Oz. It’s there he tells her about the fate of the Falcons.
The panel was also timed to a midseason teaser (below) that dropped on Thursday. (New episodes debut Sundays on HBO and stream on Max.)
The Penguin has been connecting with viewers. It’s outpacing every other current HBO series (aside from its biggest ones, House of the Dragon and The Last of Us) since its series premiere on Sept. 19.
In the first half of the NYCC panel discussion on Wednesday, Farrell, LeFranc, and Mike Marino, The Penguin’s prosthetic makeup designer, elaborated on their prior relationships to Penguin comic material, how LeFranc got the call to do the limited series — including previewing 40 minutes of Matt Reeves’ The Batman — and the transition from film to TV.
“Going back to the earliest carnation of the character [for The Batman], I had the best time designing what he looked like. I think Colin is so transformative in the role and really brings it to another level,” Marino told the audience. “There were a lot of days where we didn’t get to film [when making the movie], where we’d get [Colin] into make-up and they’d say, ‘Well, we’re not really going to get to him today.’ We didn’t get a chance to explore it too much. It was a very long year. He texted me and said — we’re going to do it again. He said: We’re going to do round two [with the TV show],” added Marino.
The Max series has been billed as a limited series, but have hinted a spinoff might be in the works. Recently, Farrell said he was grateful for the role but got candid about hesitations of doing more, saying he wasn’t sure if he would ever want to “put that fucking suit and that fucking head on again.” He told Total Film magazine, “Don’t get me wrong — I loved it — but it got in on me a little bit. By the end of it, I was bitching and moaning to anyone who would listen to me that I fucking wanted it to be finished.”
During the NYCC panel, Marino explained of the work behind-the-scenes, “It was a great opportunity to explore his make-up, his character and see what we could refine from the film. Technical pieces, changing the design for the better. We were filming in so many lighting environments, he’s in the make-up much longer, so it’s a huge maintenance to keep this magnet trick together for that long.”
Midway through the panel following a second clip, the trio returned, alongside Kelly, Feliz, Milioti, O’Connell and Brown who offered more insight on the series, including filming the scene between Sofia and Johnny, and what may be motivating the characters: nature or nuture.
“Dealer’s choice. I think there was a reason [her father] saw in her she was the one to take over the family, but I don’t think it would have come out the same way if what happened to her hadn’t happened to her,” Milioti said, before Farrell added his own thoughts.
“I’m not certain,” he said, “I think he’s always lived under the weight of being. Human beings want to distinguish themselves, until you’re special in a way that is imposed on you, in a way that society says isn’t cool and isn’t acceptable. He was always going to end up losing his mind at some point. The eight hours is, for him, kind of a descent into … it’s supposed to be an ascension into power, but it’s also descent into a kind of madness that is born of the pain that he’s lived with all his life. He’s got a very strong mother figure in his life, played by Delia in hand, and she’s believed to him, and she’s loved him. But even that hasn’t been enough for him.”
For Victor, Oz was an “inspiring figure” that is “maybe a hybrid of a brother or a father” telling “him something that was maybe very painful” and “offering him is something a bit more exciting,” Feliz said. “He’d lost his family just a week ago, so for him, it’s: I get to be a part of something bigger than myself now. Money is also an incredibly incentivizing factor when you don’t have enough of it. I think he sees this confident, chest-out kind of guy who’s a little bit louder. Maybe for himself, he kind of would like to see that part himself and live a little bit more, too.”
Throughout the panel, discussions of previous iterations of Batman characters, including The Penguin, were discussed with Farrell acknowledging Adam West, Danny DeVito, and the worlds of Christopher Nolan and Tim Burton. When LeFranc was asked about what specifically inspired her take on Sofia Falcone, a character and performance by Milioti that has received high praise, the showrunner pointed to American royalty.
“I was inspired by Rosemary Kennedy’s story. She was deemed the forgotten daughter. In her 20s, her father put her in an institution and she was given a lobotomy. We don’t know what her story was,” the Penguin showrunner told the audience. “Thinking like a character like Sofia and bringing her into the world … as a character I wish I had when I was younger, I wanted to relate her to something that felt very real.”
LeFranc and Farrell discussed the particular significance of the relationship between Oz and his mother, Francis, at various points throughout the panel. “Oz’s relationship with his mother, Lauren spoke to me about it and I found that very enticing,” Farrell said of why he was interested in continuing his portrayal of Penguin through the limited series. “It was so well detailed and unusual. It was an awkward angle to arrive at Oz’s psychology through his mother.”
The ways various characters see and understand Oz was ALSO explored throughout the panel, with O’Connell addressing whether Francis Cobb was proud of her son and his attempts to climb the ladder in Gotham’s criminal underbelly. “I think she’s very proud of what he’s doing some of the time. There’s this way she’s constantly arming him,” O’Connell said. “She’s using him as a weapon.”
“In the film, whenever I had five scenes, they were all very light. Oz’s purpose was to be a diversion, a red herring. We didn’t get to dig into his backstory, his psychology. I knew eight hours of television was going to be an opportunity to really get into the weeds,” Colin said about getting into the character through the series.
Beyond character and makeup effects, LeFranc spoke about the casting and what she enjoyed about getting to write Oz.
In terms of the cast, the showrunner took a moment to shout out the series’ casting directors, before crediting the performers with delivering while enduring multiple challenges to get to the show from production to screen. “‘[The casting] makes every writer look great. It was a lot of fun despite the content being very violent or twisted or dark,” she said. “It’s a hard show to make. We have a really challenging schedule, we had two strikes. Everyone really banded together and made it something so incredibly special.”
She also noted that Oz and the world around him is both fun and thrilling to write. “When I was writing the first episode, I was writing by myself, and I took long walks making sure I could get his humor right, or what I thought he would think is funny. Every script, and every scene, have strange little moments that maybe aren’t the driving force of the scene, but they’re there undercutting the kind of humor or a little detail or a little look.”
The Penguin is executive produced by Matt Reeves, Dylan Clark, Farrell, writer-showrunner Lauren LeFranc, director Craig Zobel and Bill Carraro.
Based on characters created for DC by Bob Kane with Bill Finger, The Penguin is produced by Reeves’ 6th & Idaho Productions and Dylan Clark Productions in association with Warner Bros Television, where Reeves and 6th & Idaho are under an overall deal, and DC Studios. Daniel Pipski is an executive producer.
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