Colin Farrell Misunderstood The Batman's Penguin Until He Saw The DC Villain's Design

2022's "The Batman" gave us an emo Caped Crusader in a Gotham that seemed designed to echo the look of David Fincher's "Seven." But the movie wasn't all broody Bruce and gloomy industrial decay. It also featured Colin Farrell's Oswald Cobb, aka Penguin, who amid the grim environs of the movie was about as close to comic relief as we got. Farrell's parodic wiseguy accent and his charming yet sort of pathetic manner made him a fan-favorite, and the actor himself clearly had a ball portraying the infamous Batman rogue. But it took some time for him to fully "get" the character, who he initially saw as "a bit silly" and "a bit of a putz." Thankfully, once he saw the character design, he came around.

Prior to Farrell's portrayal of Oz Cobb, the Penguin had been portrayed by Danny DeVito in Tim Burton's 1992 expressionist nightmare "Batman Returns" and by Burgess Meredith in the decidedly un-nightmarish "Batman" TV series of the 1960s. It was these performances that Farrell had in mind when he was first asked to appear in Matt Reeves' "The Batman."

In an interview with Variety, Farrell talked about his two predecessors, who he recalled watching as a child, and said he was "so excited" to put his spin on the character. However, when he read the screenplay, he was taken aback. "The script came, I read it, and I was like, eh? I've only got five scenes. I got so greedy. I didn't really get it, either. That was the shortsighted part." But it wasn't just his screen time that Farrell was concerned about, as he initially found Oz to be a bit of a joke.

In his Variety interview, Colin Farrell went on to explain how his initial impression of Oswald Cobb wasn't all that positive. "I don't know, it's a bit one-note," he said. "He's a bit silly; he's a bit of a putz. Could this be more interesting?" Indeed, the character isn't given all that much to do in "The Batman," which featured as its main villain Paul Dano's Edward Nashton/The Riddler. The film also had to establish Robert Pattinson as a new Dark Knight and introduce Zoë Kravitz's Selina Kyle/Catwoman, which didn't leave all that much room for old Oz Cobb.

That said, Farrell ultimately managed to steal the scenes he was in, contributing multiple quotables to the movie and becoming a fan-favorite in the process. That's to say nothing of his HBO spin-off series "The Penguin," which debuted in 2024 and not only gave Farrell all the screen time he could want but transformed Oz Cobb from a pathetic underling into a seriously imposing crime boss. As such, the actor admitted his first impression of the character was wrong. "I was wrong because it was there on the page," he said. "I just couldn't see it. I had some preconceived notion or something that I was looking for, and it wasn't that."

But it wasn't his experience on-set or the spin-off series being greenlit that turned Farrell around on his character. It was the Penguin design itself, which as pretty much everybody knows made the Irish star basically unrecognizable (and raised the question of why the Penguin wasn't being played by Richard Kind).

Mike Marino was the man responsible for transforming Colin Farrell into Oswald Cobb. The makeup designer worked alongside his artist Mike Fontaine to create and apply the unique prosthetics that would take Farrell from leading man to slovenly mob underling. As the actor recalled in his Variety interview, when Matt Reeves asked if he'd spoken to Marino ahead of his first fitting, he confirmed that he'd "been sending pictures back and forth," to which Reeves replied "Did Mike show you what you're going to look like?" Farrell continued:

"I'll never forget, Matt went, 'Come here, come here, come here.' And he opened up his laptop and he went, 'Look!' It was the first time I saw the makeup ... and the cogs crunched."

When the actor asked whether CGI was going to be involved, Reeves assured him that Marino could make him look like the image on that laptop screen and that "nobody'll notice." It was after this that Farrell started to see the movie in a new way, "The script became clear to me," he said. "I could see through Mike Marino's imagination and every little pockmark and every scar. The character was ferocious looking, but there was also, I could imagine, a sadness to aspects of that character's life. It just gave me so much information."

The actor recalled a "very weird" first screen test which he described as being like a "possession" and "as close to being overtaken by something as I have ever been." After that, Farrell went on to have unbridled fun with The Penguin, who is set to appear in the long-awaited "The Batman Part II," which recently recruited a key figure from the best 2025 sci-fi series.