The Penguin’s Production Designer Tells Us About How Her Firsthand Experience During A Natural Disaster Inspired Her Version Of Gotham

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The Penguin is very much a show about Colin Farrell’s Oswald Cobb. However, upon watching the first few episodes of the new HBO series on the 2024 TV schedule, it’s easy to pick up that it’s also a cast study of Gotham City as a whole and how the metropolis is still dealing with the impact of The Riddler’s flood. The way the city looks just days after The Batman ending was largely inspired by firsthand experiences with natural disasters.

In the first episode of the series, which does a great job of setting up Oswald Cobb’s journey, we also see that while some areas of Gotham were seemingly unaffected by the disaster, others were left in ruins or still under water nearly a week after the great flood. CinemaBlend recently spoke with production designer Kalina Ivanov, who revealed to us that she channeled her firsthand experiences to build a city of haves and have-nots to drive home a lot of the messages of the series:

I lived through Hurricane Sandy in New York, and I experienced firsthand what happened when that hurricane hit and the city lost power, and how the Upper East Side, some people never even lost power, but their power was restored on day one, where I lived in the East Village, and that was restored on day five. And you can literally tell which neighborhood was more important to the city, what was the most important neighborhood to the city, and what was not. It was a very clear indication of the haves and the have-nots. And I and my family somehow fell into the have-nots even though we were perfectly middle-class citizens.

Touching back on The Penguin, Ivanova explained that she and her team wanted to show the destruction caused by the flood and the dichotomy between the rich and poor in Gotham and how the lower class was disproportionately impacted by The Riddler’s attack:

We were making a point about what happens when city services stopped working for its citizens, and how it really affected poor people who were left neglected by the city. And while the rich people simply got in their cars and went to Bristol Township across the bridge and lived unscathed, and the flood didn't even touch them.

In addition to pulling from her own experiences, Ivanov, who’s also working on the upcoming Peacemaker Season 2, revealed that she conducted a great deal of research to create this destroyed and divided Gotham for the new show. This involved everything from floods in Germany to Hurricane Katrina, which brought an unparalleled level of destruction to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in August 2005. She explained:

Katrina was the big one for us because it related directly to the US system of how FEMA handles this, and what their system of marking buildings what is level one destruction, what is level five destruction, what is the symbol for a contaminated building. We really used the actual FEMA system in our show, and we used a lot of the very powerful images of when the water pushes cars and bunches them up and piles them up.

All of these firsthand experiences, countless hours of research, and planning all worked together to create a TV show setting that not only looks like it’s on par with the movie that preceded it but also like it’s part of the aftermath of a real disaster.

New episodes of The Penguin air Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and for anyone with a Max subscription.