Colin Farrell's incredible Penguin makeup even shocked costar Cristin Milioti

The star of The Penguin is Colin Farrell, who plays crafty criminal Oswald Cobb. He's gotten a ton of praise for playing an ambitious, ruthless man who still has pockets of vulnerability. But Farrell isn't doing it alone. He has help from Mike Marino, who's responsible for the incredible makeup that transforms the handsome Farrell into the pockmarked Oz.

Speaking to USA Today, Marino said that the main thing he kept in mind when designing the Penguin's makeup was that “no matter how human he may appear and how charming and charismatic, he is a Batman villain. Someone who is operating in a very dangerous underworld and it is ruthless.” Oz's duality is reflected on his face. “There's one side that really is fairly natural and the other side is completely violent. His teeth are broken (and) flesh maybe hung off of his face at one point, stitched back together.” Also note Oz's sharp nose and "animal-like" eyebrows, which are modeled off the V-shape Marino saw in real-life penguins when he looked at them from the front.

It all results in a remarkable transformation that is all but guaranteed to win Marino and Farrell Emmys come awards season. And Farrell may well thank Marino during his inevitable acceptance speech, since it informed his performance. According to Farrell, the first time time he saw himself in makeup, “it just spoke volumes to me about him as a man, about his toughness but also a certain vulnerability, what it would be like to carry yourself through the world looking like that all pockmarked and scarred up.”

"I felt like I was free to throw paint at the wall as aggressively as I could. And some of that was the liberation that was afforded me by not seeing myself."

According to Farrell, the show is “a descent into his madness and into his ultimate psychopathy,” so that freedom will likely prove useful. The transformation is so complete that it even shocked Farrell's costar Cristin Milioti (Sofia Falcone), who was filming with him for eight months. “I saw (Farrell) one time out of makeup. I would hear that voice and it was like someone had Freaky Friday'd. It was so strange,” she said. “You would never, ever know up close that there was makeup. It's incredible.”

The Penguin crushes it in the ratings

And there are a lot of people out there enjoying Farrell, Milioti, and Marino's work. Per The Hollywood Reporter, HBO says that the first episode has racked up 10.4 cross-platform viewers during its first 11 days of availability. That's better nearly every other HBO series over the same time frame, excluding biggees like House of the Dragon and The Last of Us. As for Sunday's second episode, it collected 1.6 million viewers across platforms the night of, a 17% improvement on the series premiere.

In short, the show is doing great, which bodes well for The Batman Epic Crime Saga that The Batman director Matt Reeves is hoping to build. (That's his name for it, not ours.) The Penguin itself has Lauren LeFranc as showrunner, but Reeves sees the series as one piece of a wider universe. I always get nervous when producers start talking about cinematic universes since they have a tendency to grow too big for their own good, but so far The Batman and The Penguin are rock solid — I think The Penguin is the better product — so...so far, so good.

While we're talking about ratings, the newest episode of The Penguin led into the season finale of Industry, which has drawn a third more viewers this season than it last for season 2. Plus, Industry is becoming a critical darling. It looks like we have a very HBO situation, with an innovative, critically acclaimed series like Industry running alongside a slickly produced genre piece like The Penguin, and all shall prosper.

New episodes of The Penguin drop Sundays on HBO and Max.

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