Why ‘The Penguin’ made Colin Farrell want to form ‘a support group’ with Jim Carrey
Colin Farrell pulls off his biggest chameleon act yet, disappearing beneath makeup and prosthetics to look unrecognizable in HBO’s “The Penguin.”
“It wasn’t limiting, it was so the opposite,” Farrell, 48, exclusively told The Post.
“It was such a liberating experience, to be so submerged beneath all that stuff. I felt like I had full permission to just throw paint at the wall.”
He added, “But, it was weird to look in the mirror for the first time, and see that looking back.”
Premiering Sept. 19 on HBO (9 p.m.) and streaming on Max, the crime drama is a spinoff from the 2022 “The Batman” movie. Directed by Matt Reeves (who is an exec producer on the show), the movie starred Robert Pattinson in the title role and Farrell as the famous Batman villain.
The show “The Penguin” picks up shortly after the events of “The Batman,” and follows Oswald “Oz” Cobb, aka the Penguin, a balding, overweight, underestimated small-time criminal with a clubfoot and a limp, as he makes chaotic schemes and tries to rise to the top of the criminal underworld.
The Irish star, who was most recently nominated for an Oscar for the 2022 film “The Banshees of Inisherin,” is no stranger to changing his appearance for roles – Farrell put on weight for the 2015 Yorgos Lanthimos movie, “The Lobster.”
But, he wasn’t keen to go full method for “The Penguin,” he said.
“I had gained a good bit of weight for a show called ‘The North Water,’ and I was rather robust compared to what I usually am,” Farrell said.
“When I met Matt [Reeves], I had just finished ‘The North Water,’ and I was dying to get healthy again. Because I had put on a lot of weight over a short period of time, and I had messed myself up, as people do. It happens sometimes. I met Matt in London in a hotel, and he went, ‘This looks great!’”
Farrell recalled that after the director praised his bulkier appearance, “I went, ‘Well, tough s – – t, because it’s f – – king going!’”
The “Miami Vice” star said that he pitched the idea, “‘What about having like a really slender Penguin?’ and [Reeves] said, ‘Ah, I don’t think so.’”
The “In Bruges” star explained that he realized with “the technology and the artists that create these bodysuits, we could do extraordinary stuff. So, I didn’t have to go the extra distance and mess with my heath a little bit, again.”
Farrell wore a two piece bodysuit to play Oz. “And then the makeup was in seven to eight pieces,” he explained. “The only thing I had to physically do was to figure out Oz’s walk.”
The whole aesthetic took three hours to assemble every day, and forty minutes to remove, he said.
“I had to get rid of his good looks … that wasn’t flying in Gotham,” Oscar nominated prosthetic makeup designer Mike Marino told The Post.
“He’s great,” he added about Farrell, “because he let us do that. It’s not everyone that will let you do what we did to him, to this extent.”
As Marino and his team physically transformed him, Farrell said he passed that time by listening to “all sorts of music, from every genre,” citing New Order, Whitesnake and Duran Duran among the bands.
“And we had chats, and watched interviews with [legendary makeup artist] Dick Smith and John Carpenter.”
Farrell admitted, “having the makeup on got old by the end of the day. At a certain point in the shoot, I remembered reading something about Jim Carrey losing his s – – t on ‘The Grinch.’ So, I remember looking up Jim Carrey ‘The Grinch’ interviews, and seeing his quotes, just because it was beginning to get to me, a little bit.”
“So, I remember just almost needing a support group, but knowing it was a cottage industry,” Farrell recalled.
But he added, “I love Mike [Marino], and his team of artists are extraordinary, and we all got very close … for the first time ever, I was [on set] before all the crew, and I left after all the crew. It was a magic time.”
