Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti Talk Bringing The Penguin and His World to Life in New Max Miniseries

Colin Farrell reprises his sinister role as Oz Cobb in the Max spinoff series The Penguin. Set after the events of the 2022 blockbuster powerhouse The Batman, Oz returns to the television screen with a plan in motion to rule the criminal world that plagues Gotham. The series is led by showrunner Lauren LeFranc, with incredible prosthetic makeup created for Farrell by Mike Marino. Colin Farrell, Cristin Milioti, Rhenzy Feliz, Dierdre O’Connell, Marino, and LeFranc sat down together to discuss what fans can expect to see in the new series.

LeFranc touched on expanding Oz’s world after his introduction in the 2022 blockbuster hit. She praised Marino’s Oscar nominated creation of The Penguin’s prosthetic makeup and the meticulous planning that he and director Matt Reeves put toward each and every character in their iteration of Gotham. She spoke on her unique experience of entering a world that had already began prior. “For me, it’s always about creating engaging, interesting characters,” she said at the press conference. “I had the benefit of already having Oz Cobb, and thanks to Mike who created this incredible prosthetic that just makes it so seamless, and what Colin already did in The Batman was amazing.”

Marino peeled back the curtain into his and Reeves’ thought process when they originally designed Farrell’s iteration of Oz. He and Reeves bonded over their love for the comic book world of Batman, so they didn’t take the task of creating a new Oswald Cobblepot lightly. “[Reeves] mentioned some gangsters,” he shared. “Some ‘30s gangsters, some ‘50s gangsters, mob people and I went along and had the idea of looking at all of these birds, looking at penguins, and how do I incorporate any of that type of information subliminally into his face.”

Farrell underwent a complete physical transformation thanks to countless hours of research and planning by the production crew. “I found this penguin with this really powerful brow, very angled. So I gave a little bit more of an intimidating gesture to the eyebrow and his nose, I gave this subliminal aspect of a beak and the shape of the nostril being like a bird’s mouth slightly,” Marino explained. “So all of these things layered on top of one another created this strange new person that doesn’t exist.”

Farrell commented on his astonishment for the creativity behind this story. From Marino creating an unrecognizable bodysuit sculpt for Oz to LeFranc’s dedication to expanding the sinister underground world of Gotham for Oz and his circle. “It’s not just The Penguin Oz show. It’s all these human beings that are so complex and multifaceted,” said Farrell. “I just knew that we were going to get to look into the engine of this guy personally in an interesting way.”

Even though Farrell didn’t mention any distinct performances he took inspiration from, he did reveal that he and Batman villain alumni Danny DeVito shared some harmless jabs at one another. DeVito, who played an infamous iteration of Oz in Batman Returns, engaged in a text war with Farrell about who was the better Penguin between the two.

Cristin Milioti joins the miniseries as Sofia Falcone, the sister of the late Batman villain Alberto Falcone. She couldn’t help but gush about joining the Batman family. I’m also like a very life-long Batman fan. So, I’ve been dreaming of this since I was very little. On a personal level, it was extremely surreal,” she shared.
And then, as an actor, I was like, ‘Oh my god! I would read each script and I would like pinch myself when I would realize what I was going to get to do.”

Rhenzy Feliz, who plays Victor Aguilar, a teen who becomes a protege to Oz in the series, spoke about the complex relationship that forms between Oz and Victor. “One of the things that I think [Victor] mostly looks up to is this very confident guy that for no reason on paper is very confident, but yet he still has it. His own body is like massive and he’s got charisma and he’s so confident,” said Feliz. “And so, I think that’s something that Victor even looks up to.”

Dierdre O’Connell, who plays Francis Cobb, Oz’s mother, shared nothing but complete admiration and amazement for Farrell’s performance and transformation into the Penguin. She admits she would forget Oz wasn’t the real person she was interacting with on stage. Farrell’s dedication to the role was so intense that to her, all she saw was Oz. She continued by explaining how effortlessly she melted into playing Oz’s mother thanks to the transformation of Farrell. “There was something about the second I saw [Farrell] in [his] full regalia,” she said. “I felt like, ‘Oh, oh game on, there’s my boy.’ I felt complete.”

Farrell continued to speak on his transformation and dedicating all his effort to fully realizing Oz in his true form. He recounted the moment he let Oz takeover. “When you see a cat seeing themselves in the mirror for the first time and they recoil. I mean, looking back at it, your reflection, and it’s not what you have seen for 45 years, it’s really, really powerful,” he said. “I just gave myself over to that.”

Marino shed more light on the physical prosthetics that he and his team hand crafted to make Oz come to life. He explained that even though they had the initial design already made thanks to The Batman years prior, each day while filming the show brought new additions and obstacles for sustaining the Oz Cobb they so carefully built brick by brick. “We tried to preserve the makeup as much as possible. So it was a two-and-a-half to three-hour process, months in the planning and developing,” he said. “And I think that he’s progressing as a human does. No one’s face stays the same. It could be six months apart and people could look completely different.”

While Farrell is the man behind the title of this series, he made it clear that this isn’t just about the Penguin. He gushed over LeFranc’s dedication to creating fully realized characters in all facets of her story, not just a fully developed leading character. LeFranc spoke about her determination to give all her characters, especially the female characters on the screen the complexity, and the riveting stories they deserved. She recalled being a kid and only ever imagining herself as the male leads in a superhero film. “I think it was because I found them more interesting,” she said. “I think in part it’s because they were given more interesting stories as backgrounds.”

She continued by saying, for this project, she made it a priority to give every character a story that was worth hearing. “I wanted to reach that younger version of myself and other women and men. I think we should all just have more complicated people on screen, more flawed people on screen,” she said. “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 back story, the same amount of complicated trauma in certain moments and who they are and a dissection of that.”

New episodes of The Penguin drop each Sunday on Max.