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
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.