Max’s The Penguin is expanding the world of The Batman even further than Matt Reeves’ original movie (and the upcoming sequel.) The eight-part Max Original centers on the story Oswald “Oz” Cobb in the immediate aftermath of the demise of Carmine Falcone and the power vacuum he leaves.
Colin Farrell plays the Penguin as he attempts to clinch the top role in Gotham’s criminal underbelly, something that is complicated by the appearance of Sofia Falcone, played by Cristin Milioti, fresh from a stint in Arkham.
Inverse got brand new details for the series from the San Diego Comic-Con panel, which featured Matt Reeves, showrunner Lauren LeFranc, Executive Producer Dylan Clark, prosthetics and makeup designer Mike Marino, and stars Cristin Milioti and Rhenzy Feliz. Colin Farrell didn’t appear at the panel, but did appear over Zoom.
The most exciting element of the panel was the new trailer for the series, which shows Oz’s complicated relationship with his mother, Sofia’s twisted past in Arkham, and the two meeting for the first time. Check out the full trailer below.
It looks like the main focus of the series will be what happens between these two characters — or what has already happened. “They have a long history,” Cristin Milioti said. “I would say it’s a real power struggle between the two of them.”
“They have a shared history that goes back,” Colin Farrell says. “When we meet them in the present tense we may get a bit of a flashback. Something happened between the two of them.”
The two characters are similar in many ways, he says, but that’s a dynamic that changes. “At a certain stage in the eight hours, certain things happen that makes it clear they’re very different people.”
But all the panelists seemed to agree on one thing — Colin Farrell was the perfect actor for the role. Farrell himself admitted he heard the criticisms that the role should be played by someone who was larger and avoid the use of fat suits altogether. “If I didn’t have this role, I would probably be saying the same thing.” But, he reassured the audience, it wasn’t an option because of the way the character was built. He was cast, and then he consulted with Lauren LeFranc and Mike Marino to design the character.
Marino praised Farrell’s face, calling it a perfect “blank slate” build upon, and touched on the inspiration for The Penguin’s design — Fredo Corleone from The Godfather and even Harvey Weinstein. “I looked at injured birds and older, grizzled penguins with chipped beaks and tried to figure out how to translate that.
Also posed with an issue of translation is showrunner Lauren LeFranc, who gets to expand the story of The Penguin over eight hours. “We kinda call it daytime noir,” she said of the series’ crime drama tone. “Gotham is its own character, and because we pick up right after the flood, it’s devastated. Gotham as a character is broken and our characters are broken.”
