‘The Penguin’: Behind The Decision To Make Colin Farrell Completely Unrecognizable As Oz Cobb
deadline.comMatt Reeves didn’t start out wanting Colin Farrell to disappear behind a pile of prosthetics. When his discussions with the actor began before the making of 2022’s The Batman, the primary focus was on the inspiration for Oz Cobb, not over whether Farrell should resemble comic book renderings of the classic DC villain for both the movie and the HBO series The Penguin that’s debuting Sept.
19. “We talked a lot about Fredo. We talked about John Cazale in The Godfather, and the idea of maybe trying to give him a penguin nose, or doing something to kind of mess up Colin’s face to get the sense of somebody who’d been overlooked, somebody who had this ambition inside of him but who was mocked and who had been looked down upon,” recalls Reeves to Deadline. “All of a sudden one day [prosthetics designer] Mike Marino said, ‘let me show you what I’ve been working on.’ Mike is an incredible artist, and he did this sculpture.
I’m telling you, the sculpture was exactly the way that Oz looks right now. It’s incredible. And I was like, ‘wait, what?’ We had never said, ‘let’s just take Colin and turn him into something that we’ve never seen before.’ I said, this is ‘Colin Farrell.
I got to now tell the studio he’s not going to look like Colin Farrell.” When Hollywood typically asks an actor to change their appearance for a role, some semblance of their identity still remains.
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