Colin Farrell, Showrunner Lauren LeFranc, And The Cast Of ‘The Penguin’ Talk Oz, Names, And Characters

An important thing to known about HBO’s new limited series, The Penguin: It centers on Oswald “Oz” Cobb (Colin Farrell), not Oswald Cobblepot. And showrunner Lauren LeFranc has a pretty good reason for this slight change of family name.

The series, debuting today on HBO and Max, catches up with Oz a week or so after the events of Matt Reeves‘ 2021 film, The Batman. Gotham City is still reeling from the flood unleashed by the Riddler (Paul Dano) and the underworld is realigning after the death of Carmine Falcone (John Turturro). Oz senses opportunity within the changes to the city and makes his move.

But why is he “Cobb” in this realization of Batman lore?

As LeFranc explained to Comicon.com and other outlets at a press conference last week, “It’s something that Matt and I talked about as we were developing the show … and it’s a very valid point: Cobblepot is not a [name] that exists in our universe.” The grounding of Reeves’ The Batman was one of its great successes and clearly one of the strictures the director — who also serves as an executive producer of The Penguin — placed upon himself and any potential spinoff media. Elsewhere, Reeves has also mentioned more fanciful characters like the Gentleman Ghost would be the least likely to appear in his slice of the DC Mutliverse because they break the level of grounding he’s interested in maintaining. Thus, the whimsical Cobblepot becomes the more common “Cobb.”

LeFranc added she loves the name “Cobblepot” in “the way that I’ve loved The Penguin and so many comic books and iterations of that.”

And beyond the name is the man himself, played by the astonishingly transformed Farrell, which he credits to Reeves’ take on the character and the astonishing make-up work of designer Mike Marino. “When we put the makeup on first, it was instantaneous,” the actor said. All three men had plenty of conversation about Oz and who he would be both in The Batman and The Penguin. “He really wants to be seen, and wants to be seen not as someone who was less than,” the actor, who is also an executive producer, explained. “But he wanted to have his power being given permission to be expressed on this stage of Gotham City and the underworld.”

“He’s born with a physical limitation that was — and pardon the pun — really emotionally crippling for him,” he continued. “He felt subjugated by his own limitation and what he was told his limitation was. He was bullied. He was treated cruelly by society. I’m not justifying any act, but more often than not, when somebody commits an act of cruelty in this human experience we all share, you will find out that they had been treated cruelly at some stage in their timeline.”

And Oz’s own acts of cruelty will come out in what Farrell called ” all sorts of grotesquely consequential ways” over the course of The Penguin‘s eight hours.

Beyond exploring the why and how of Oz’s mean streak, LeFranc’s also wanted to surround him with “complicated enough, quirky, off kilter people that you want to engage with.” Thus a cast which includes Cristin Milioti as Sofia Falcone, Rhenzy Feliz as Victor, and Deidre O’Connell as Oz’s mother, Francis Cobb.

A well-formed and present mother for the Penguin represents one of the biggest expansions to Oz’s backstory as, often, his lineage matters in a more distant way. “I don’t think people seek power just to seek power. I think they seek power because of a deeper want or deeper void inside of them,” LeFranc explained. The thought process led to a mother figure who had “much more emotion rooted in that” and would lead Oz to actions he believed would make her proud.

The impression one gets for Francis is an imposing figure, but O’Connell felt a certain “softness” in the moment. “When you look at Francis, you don’t think of a soft experience to play her, but there was a softness at the center like, okay, there’s nothing we can do but just go.” She likened it to a baseball pitcher, who must give their all and yet get caught up in the momentum of the action. “I think I was proud that I was able to surrender [to her],” she added.

Despite this, the relationship between Francis and her son is complicated. While Farrell suggested Oz is unquestionably loved by his mother, LeFranc pointed to a certain “withholding” of that love which drives Oz to find it elsewhere. But even if it was an unconditional motherly love, other elements of Oz’s past would make it impossible for it to ameliorate the pain he cannot regulate.

Additionally, Farrell teased one incident in Oz’s life that was “probably more consequential anything else in regards to directing him towards the man he become.” That moment is potentially tied up in his complicated upbringing and that aspect of his past will be revealed through the course of the series.

Victor, meanwhile, represents part of Oz’s future as his de facto Robin. Although, as viewers will soon see, that alliance comes with a certain amount of menace from Oz. And for Victor, the partnership is more of a “survival instinct” at the start. “[Victor’s] getting whatever you need to do to get to the next step,” Feliz explained. “But I think it grows into something.”

“I think he mostly looks up to is this very confident guy that, for no reason on paper, is very confident,” he added.

Unlike Oz and Sofia, the character is original to the series and Feliz looked first to the scripts to craft the performance. “So much of it’s on the page,” he said. “I mean so much of it is there to begin with and it’s beautifully written.” He also worked with Marc Winski, a dialect coach with a stutter, to make Victor’s manner of speech a very naturalistic thing. “All the help that he gave me on the technical aspects of it all, I think it informed so much of how Victor moved through life in general,” he explained.

For Milioti, a life-long Batman fan, getting to play a new take on Sofia Falcone was “extremely surreal” but also an “honor” as the character will do some unexpected things. As revealed previously, this version of Sofia spent time in Arkham Asylum and it leads to different sort of mob daughter and a legitimate menace. “You read [the script], and you start like salivating because I couldn’t believe that I was going to get a chance to do this,” she said of what the part was asking of her.

“I really care about this character in like a really vulnerable way. I really love her,” she added.

Like Milioti, LeFranc also loves the characters — and Batman in general — but still wants to see how far they can stretch into new territory. While honoring the traditions of the Batman comics is always part of the process she, like any writer who takes charge of Detective Comics or another Batman title, was most excited to “create new canon and to be able to create new characters or to evolve the characters in a different way and just put my own stamp on it. ”

Putting such a stamp can be exhausting and Farrell admitted to a certain relief as he took off the make-up and the character at the end of production. “All the characters and their journeys were so well drawn, whether it was somebody’s ascent to power like Oz’s, it was also coinciding with his descent into madness and psychopathy, but by the end of it, I was knackered.” he said. At the same time, he is honored to be among a troupe of actors that includes Burgess Meredith and Danny DeVito.

“[He] and I shared a few texts back and forth,” Farrell revealed. ‘But that was more taking the piss out of each other about who’s the best Penguin [and] sending him pictures of action figures and sh*t, and ‘yours is more accurate than mine. What’s up with that? Who did the paint job on my action figure?’ But nothing too serious or weighty, you know?”

Nevertheless, per Reeves own comments at Comic-Con International: San Diego 2024 and elsewhere, Farrell and Oz will be back in The Batman 2. But fans of his take on the character can watch him rise to power in The Penguin starting tonight at 9pm.