Colin Farrell won't rule out returning as the Penguin, but HATES wearing the fatsuit

Next week, HBO will air The Penguin, a new show that follows the famous Batman villain as he rises through the ranks of the Gotham City criminal underworld. Colin Farrell will return to play the title character after debuting him in the 2022 film The Batman, directed by Matt Reeves.

I am intrigued. Basing a whole spinoff on a minor character from a Batman movie sounds a little suspect, but HBO usually puts out quality TV, so I'll assume they had a good reason for making this. Also, it's wild to know that it's famous actor Colin Farrell beneath all that makeup and under that prosthetic fatsuit. He looks unrecognizable. When I saw The Batman, I don't think I realized Farrell was in it until I read about it later.

That kind of transformation doesn't come easy. Apparently the prospect of going through that again is one of the big things holding Farrell back from immediately signing onto a second season.  "I don’t know, man," he told Total Film. "Don't get me wrong – I loved it – but it got in on me a little bit. By the end of it, I was bitching and moaning to anyone who would listen to me that I fucking wanted it to be finished. I tried to remind them that I had 'grumpy gratitude.' I was still grateful, and still honored – I grew up watching Burgess Meredith [who played the Penguin in the 1960s Batman TV series], and then Danny DeVito [in Tim Burton's 1992 film Batman Returns] was my Penguin – so being a part of the lineage of that storytelling, I really did feel privileged. But by the end of it…"

"[Showrunner Lauren LeFranc] said, 'Look, if I could find a way that makes sense, would you talk about it?' And I said, 'Absolutely.' And maybe in a year I would. But when I finished I was like, 'I never want to put that fucking suit and that fucking head on again.'"

It wasn't only the physical transformation that's daunting to Farrell. Occupying the headspace of a brutal criminal was also a challenge. "It's not like I didn't know who I was and I was going out and burning cars and shit, but… if you take what Matt Reeves created and then what Lauren did and what Mike [Marino, prosthetics and make-up designer] did and put them all together, it was a really powerful experience."

We'll find out whether anybody is even interested in seeing a second season of The Penguin when it premieres on HBO and Max on Thursday, September 19 (the next episode won't air until the following Sunday, and then new episodes will come out every Sunday after that; the release schedule is weird). But so far as the physical transformation goes, I have to ask the obvious question: if transforming the famously good-looking Colin Farrell into an ugly, corpulent villain was such a pain, why didn't Matt Reeves just hire an actor who looked a little more like the Penguin to begin with?

I imagine Farrell was hired for his name as well as his talent; he's a good actor. But I wonder if there was a plus-sized actor out there who doesn't have matinee good looks who could have been hired instead and saved everyone a lot of time.

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