Colin Farrell Didn't Want To Put On Weight To Play The Penguin In The Batman
To prepare for Yorgos Lanthimos' 2015 dark comedy "The Lobster," Colin Farrell gained over 40 pounds in just eight weeks. He guzzled cola, fries, cheeseburgers, chocolate cake, and microwaved cartons of ice cream to hit the target. It was "not that fun," Farrell remarked at Cannes that year. But "The Banshees of Inisherin" star is far from the only actor to undergo such a brutal body transformation. The likes of Christian Bale, Mark Wahlberg, Anne Hathaway, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Natalie Portman have done as much — and have later voiced how the process took a toll on them.
Wouldn't it be easier for everyone involved to just hire an actor who already has the body shape the character's supposed to have? (Or at least someone within the general range.) Even if that's not an option for whatever reason, surely regular movie magic — make-up, prosthetics, forced perspectives, and so on — is better than opening yourself up to all the health concerns that come from rapid and forced weight fluctuations.
Having gone through that ordeal, Farrell had a similar skepticism towards the process when it came time for Matt Reeves' "The Batman," where he was going to play the heavyset Oswald "Oz" Cobblepot, aka The Penguin. This despite the fact that he already had some weight on, thanks to a recent TV show. But Farrell said "no way," he told Total Film last year:
"I was somewhat bigger when I met [Reeves], and he liked the weight that I had on for a TV series called 'The North Water.' I played a whaler and I put on quite a bit of weight. And Matt was like, 'Oh, yeah, I love it. I think that's Oz!' And I was like, 'Nah, man, let's have a thin Oz because I'm not feeling great now, I have to lose this weight. There's no way I was keeping it on, man.'"
Pulling off the look without the weight
As those who've seen "The Banshees of Inisherin" can attest, Colin Farrell did end up losing all the weight he gained for "The North Water." Owing to that, the version of Farrell we got as the Penguin had to be covered up in a heavy amount of makeup and prosthetics. The first makeup test "took about six or eight hours" and it involved "about 12 people," Farrell explained. "Someone was there that had molded the teeth. Someone was there that had done the hair. ['The Batman' makeup artist] Mike [Marino] and his team were there, three or four of them were applying different pieces because it's six or eight different individual prosthetic pieces."
Having this much makeup on might sound overwhelming for an actor, but Farrell seemed to thoroughly enjoy wearing all of it. "You get such license to have absolute freedom of motion and expression and articulation of thought and feeling," he added. "I had no idea what I was going to do without that makeup. And then when I saw the makeup, everything was clear, the way the character moved, the way he sounded."
The Penguin was hardly the most important character Robert Pattinson's Batman had to interact with in the film, yet the loveable mobster made enough of an impression that the character's getting his own TV show. It just goes to show that when it comes to depicting a heavyset person in a movie, there are better options than making an actor drink glasses of olive oil, or forcing them to stick to a body weight they're not comfortable with. The version of the Penguin we got may have required a lot of movie magic to pull off, but it was still one of the best live adaptations of the character we've gotten so far.