SPOILER ALERT: This article discusses plot points from the series premiere of “The Penguin,” now streaming on Max.
The climax of the premiere episode of HBO’s “The Penguin” sees Colin Farrell‘s Oz Cobb being stripped nude and tortured by Cristin Milioti’s Sofia Falcone.
Falcone does this because she rightfully suspects Oz is responsible for the murder of Alberto Falcone, who’s her brother — and the son of notorious crime boss Carmine Falcone, who was killed by Paul Dano’s Riddler in Matt Reeves’ 2022 film, “The Batman.”
The scene is squirm-inducing and chilling, made all the more grotesque by the fact that Oz is bare and exposed. Farrell’s makeup and prosthetics team doubled down on their commitment to capturing Oz’s, ahem… physicality as accurately as possible.
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Though Oz’s body isn’t shown in its totality to audiences, that doesn’t mean that the team didn’t create prosthetic genitalia for Oz/Farrell to wear.
Farrell stresses to Variety how thankful he was to Michael Marino, the prosthetics designer for “The Penguin,” for being “kind enough to make Oz, shall we say, anatomically correct. I had a velcro piece to stick on, and a nice retro bush.” These additional prosthetics, specific to the torture scene, were fitted addendum to the layers of makeup and prosthetics he was already wearing in his body and face in order to physically transform into The Penguin.
“It gave me such surreal discomfort, which was strange because, at the end of the day, it was just makeup. It was so discomforting that I had to ask for a towel in between takes to cover me,” Farrell says. “That was kind of the strange psychological no man’s land that you could find yourself in when you’re the canvas to something as powerful as the makeup designed for it.”
He continues: “I felt incredibly exposed, even though I was anything but. I was totally covered, but I was covered by a naked man. And it’s not like I thought I was him, but it had a very strange effect on my ego.”
“The Penguin” is a crime-thriller spinoff series made by HBO, and set in the world of Reeves’ 2022 Batman blockbuster. The story, which picks up roughly a week after the events of the film, details Cobb’s meteoritic rise to power as one of the most infamous players in Batman’s rogues’ gallery.
Lauren LeFranc is the showrunner behind the series, which includes Reeves and director Craig Zobel as executive producers. In addition to Farrell and Milioti, “The Penguin” stars Deidre O’Connell as Oz’s mother, Francis Cobb; Rhenzy Feliz as his young protégé, Victor Aguilar and Clancy Brown as rival crime boss Salvatore Maroni.
The episode ends with Oz turning the tables on Sofia, manipulating the Falcones into believing that Maroni killed Alberto to avenge their usurpation of Maroni’s criminal empire.
LeFranc wanted Oz’s ability to get out of this deadly predicament to show that he isn’t someone to be toyed with. He’s calculating, ambitious and has foresight — and his ability to out-game the system enables him to always be two steps ahead of his foes.
“Oz is a gamer; he’s a schemer. He is very smart and calculated, and we obviously show in the first episode how impulsive he can be, especially when he’s laughed at and discounted,” LeFranc says. “He’s very inventive in his violence and his ambition.”
“I didn’t want to end in a straight-up cliffhanger,” she continues. “I wanted to set the tone for the audience for the kind of show we wanted to be. A guy like Oz can do all this incredible violence. This woman can torture him, and then, at the end of the day, he can still sit and have a slushie and seemingly be unaffected. And that makes him a very strange character, and I wanted to showcase that.”
The episode’s closing moments show Oz sharing a slushie with Vic Aguilar, in stark contrast to the episode’s opening, which sees Vic trying to lift Oz’s car tires. After threatening to kill him for his transgression, Oz eventually agrees to let Vic prove himself — to test him to see if Vic can run with him to help Oz ascend to the pinnacle of criminal power of Gotham.
Fun fact: For those Batman comics fans who noticed how that tire scene mirrored that of Jason Todd’s introduction to the Dark Knight himself before his eventual turn as Robin in the comics, that parallel is intentional.
“I read a lot of comics, and I did want to take different forms of inspiration and pay homage to the things that have come before. I initially created Victor from a place of, you know, ‘Batman has Robin. Why can’t Oz have somebody?’ LeFranc says. “In our grounded criminal world, realistically, young men are brought up and are taught to be violent in the mob. That’s part of it; it’s that grooming culture. And so Oz really is grooming Victor in a lot of ways, and I was interested in telling a story like that.”
Vic is a street tough from Gotham’s East Side. Though his relationship with Oz starts on somewhat hostile terms, the two form a unique bond, working together to fend off the Falcones.
When asked what Vic sees in someone like Oz and why he chooses to stick with him (other than the threat Oz poses to his life, of course!) Feliz says, “I think one of the things that enters his mind is, ‘What’s the road that I’ve got laid out ahead of me? Like, if I don’t go with Oz, what do I have?'”
“He sees Oz as the answer to that question. There’s an allure to the life that Oz lives,” Feliz says. “There’s this money, there’s this power, there’s just confidence that Oz has with him, and I think that Victor finds that very appealing.
“He starts to think, ‘You know, maybe I can make something of myself. Even though my life hasn’t led to much, now I have this opportunity to be a part of something bigger than myself.’ That excites him, and even though he feels he’s making a wrong decision, this is the one he wants to pick.”
Episode 1 of “The Penguin” brilliantly taps into the world that Reeves concocted for “The Batman,” and lays the seeds for what’s to come from the Penguin’s future in the franchise.
Here, Farrell breaks down the premiere’s most shocking moments, and what fans can expect from the series moving forward.
It is crazy to think that so much work was done to create these prosthetics that, frankly, were never going to be shown to the audience.
Well, we didn’t know if the camera would be a wide shot. Mike was hedging his bet; he leaves nothing left to chance. I was tied to the chair for hours. I couldn’t move because they had to mold it. They had to make the body, and mold it in the position I was going to be in because there’s not so much to give when you’re doing limbs. They had to wheel me in a wheelchair into the set from the trailer. Took six or seven hours of makeup.
It took seven hours to do your makeup?
I was in the makeup chair first for the first three hours, and then they got me into the wheelchair for the next three or four hours. And then they wheeled me about 300 yards to the set, put me in, and then that was it for a few hours while we shot. It was cool, though.
The torture scene was by far the most climactic in the episode. What was shooting it alongside Cristin Milioti like?
Oh my God, she’s extraordinary to work with. With some actors, you have an organic familiarity with it, and with some, you have to work towards it and have it for the camera — and it doesn’t have to exist off-camera. But I had a great affinity for everything that Cristin was doing from the get-go. She was incredibly commanding, and there was also this deep resource of pain that her character was operating from. One of the most incredible things that Lauren did in designing this whole narrative over eight hours of television was that she really paid attention to every single character. Just because the show’s called “The Penguin,” it’s not only my story. So I loved that.
What kind of a man would you say Oz is following the orchestration of his plan to deliver Alberto’s body to the Falcones’?
He’ll do whatever it takes. He’s uncompromising in his singularity with regard to his vision of what he needs to do. Betrayal is something that he doesn’t even believe in: You just do what you have to do to get ahead. And he’s been brought up by his own shoestrings. I mean, his mother raised him, but he lost his two brothers at a very young age. His father was never around, so there’s a certain amount of hardship that he’s internalized. But it just means he acts in the world with an extraordinary capacity for understanding human behavior. Maybe not his own so much, as is often the way, but he can understand other people’s behavior, needs, wants and desires. Where their soft spots are, and what their weak spots are — and he manipulates those to his own benefit without apology.
How does the brash shooting of Alberto at the top of the episode fit into that caricature?
So the Alberto thing wasn’t a plan. That was, as he says to his mother, it was “impulse.” And then she says, “No, it wasn’t impulse. It was instinct.”
Well, you know, impulse is instinct unguarded, unchecked. You have an instinct for something and are then compelled to do it. Then, the compulsion to do it and the decision to act out on it becomes the impulse made manifest. So with him, he’s very contriving. His ability to plan is extraordinary, but his impulsiveness is incredibly dangerous to be around.
What do you think Oz sees in Vic? Why does he decide to foster that relationship instead of literally killing it off?
What I see in him in him is vulnerability. I probably, without meaning to, see an opportunity to have companionship. Oz is probably lonelier than he realizes, but it’s that vulnerability, I think, and that desire to the way that Vic pleads to me to spare his life. The energy of that plea, the desperation of that plea, is born of a person that I can get to do many different things for me. That Oz can get to do many different things for him.
I should stop talking about Oz in the first person. It’s only been eight months…
This interview was edited and condensed.
