Believe it or not, Colin Farrell was "extremely uncomfortable" during The Penguin's nude torture scene

The Penguin might be the most surprising show to come out yet this year. Why is it surprising? Because it's really good, whereas cynical old me wasn't expecting much from a miniseries spun off from a superhero movie about a supporting villain character in the Batman universe. The joke's on me: The Penguin is a taut crime drama centered around a towering performance from Colin Farrel as aspiring crime kingpin Oswald Cobb, with Cristin Milioti nearly stealing his thunder as Sofia Falcone, the daughter of Gotham City's last big crime kingpin, now deceased.

There's a power vacuum in the underworld and someone's gonna fill it. Oz thinks it should be him, but Sofia quickly proves a worthy roadblock. She knows Oz has something to do with the death of her brother Alberto, who it was assumed would take over the Falcone crime family before Oz shot him in anger. To get to the bottom of things, she strips Oz naked, straps him to a chair, and prepares to torture him.

Oz is saved thanks to the intervention of his new sidekick Victor, but the scene is still very intense, not to mention technically impressive; Colin Farrell, a famously handsome and svelte actor, is buried under what must be pounds of makeup and prosthetics to play Oz, who is homely and large. Somehow it looks convincing, even when he's naked, but it comes at the cost of comfort, as episode director Craig Zobel explained to CinemaBlend.

"The amount of time that doing that takes is – it was a lot," Zobel said. "It was an extremely uncomfortable day for Colin. He couldn't go to the bathroom for hours. We all had to psych ourselves up to know how to do that. This is after a million, trillion meetings. Lots of meetings happened regarding that scene. … It was a feat. We actually moved the shooting of (that scene) several times because we were like, ‘We aren't ready.’"

This was also a very important scene for Sofia, establishing her as a threat. "I didn't want the scene to be so technical, for lack of any other way to describe it, that it got in the way of what is an interesting scene for Cristin," Zobel said. "It's an evolution of what's happening to that character. So she needed to be able to … she couldn't act in front of an empty chair. She needed Colin, and it needed to be real."

Why the Penguin isn't often called the Penguin in The Pegnuin

I fully expect scenes like this to come up later when Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti are in the Emmy conversation. Farrell in particular is murdering this extremely physical performance. It's not just about the brilliant makeup from Michael Marino, who is also guaranteed to get an Emmy. Farrell adopts an accent and walks with a limp that reminds people of — you guessed it — a penguin. It's a complete transformation, and yet you never lose the intelligence behind Oz's eyes.

Speaking of walking like a penguin, you may have noticed that Oz is seldom called by his famous moniker in the show. That's by design, as showrunner Lauren LeFranc explained to Deadline: "“I knew that Oz didn’t appreciate the term, and that was something that felt derogatory toward him,” she said. “Gangsters in mobs often they have these nicknames for people. So it made a lot of sense that his nickname from others would be the Penguin. But it’s not a term that he embraces.”

That said, the nickname will come up. In fact, Farrell talks about a deleted scene where Oz embraces it. “There are kids who say to me, ‘you’re a penguin.’ And I say, yeah, ‘that’s right.' I got the sense that Oz was actually stepping into the moniker and into his own kind of mythos. It’s not essential, but I like that idea that by the end, he’s okay with it. He sees the power in having a moniker like that.”

Like he says, by the end, perhaps things have changed. I think a lot of people are going to be interested in seeing this show through to the finish. New episodes air Sunday nights on HBO and Max.

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