If no one told you that Colin Farrell was among the cast of The Batman, you wouldn’t spot him.
uried beneath frightful layers of banked prosthetics, one of the world’s most handsome men is all but unrecognisable as Oz Cobblepot, a minor cog in the Gotham underworld who dreams of criminal greatness.
He will of course later become Penguin and if Matt Reeves’ gory epic is the big hit Warner Brothers reckon it should be, we will get to see Farrell waddle about in a coming sequel as Batman’s sewer-inhabiting adversary.
In The Batman, though, Oz is merely the affable sidekick of Jon Turturro’s altogether vile crime boss Carmine Falcone, and has not entirely gone to the bad.
“Well, he’s not really inhabiting the good either,” Farrell tells me via Zoom. “He’s working his way up the ladder, and has very clear aspirations to be the top dog. He doesn’t share those aspirations with anyone, but he’s somebody who wants to reach the top and will do anything to get there. And he’s not really Penguin yet, he’s Oz Cobblepot, yet to become the finished article.”
In Penguin, Colin is taking on a role played by many fine actors, from Burgess Meredith to Danny DeVito, and Robin Lord Taylor in the TV series Gotham.
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Colin Farrell as Oz Cobblepot (centre) in The Batman
In preparing for the part, did he think about any of those previous Penguins or do his best to ignore them?
“I grew up watching Burgess Meredith and Adam West doing their thing in spandex tights, and I loved that show when I was a kid — it was great fun and actually, I showed it to my kids a while ago and they got into it, it was lovely to revisit it with your children.
“And I was a huge fan of the two Tim Burton films. I loved Michael Keaton as Batman, I loved Danny DeVito as Penguin, and Michelle Pfeiffer was brilliant.
“So when this film came around, I was delighted because alright, I’m 45 and I’m an actor and all that, but there’s still a robust child inside me, and any time that I get to explore anything that rekindles the imagination and the excitement I had as a kid, it’s a really lovely thing. I’d a bit of that going into the Potter universe with Fantastic Beasts, and I had a load of that on this as well.
“But I didn’t go back and watch Danny, I didn’t go back and watch Burgess. I already knew them well and besides, this film was always designed in a very specific and different way.
“From the very start, Matt was really clear that he wanted it all to be grounded, that the audience wasn’t going to have to suspend too much disbelief. As you can see from the trailer, it’s not as fantastical as Tim’s was, and that’s not a good or bad thing — it’s just different, but grounded and with a sense of danger, and a kind of real world believability.
“And so with that in mind, the Oz character is drawn more from the pages of gangster films than any kind of previous iteration of the Batman myth.”
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And that, in fact, is exactly how Farrell’s Oz comes across, like a hideous, waddling version of the classic hoodlums played by the likes of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. It can’t have been easy acting under all those prosthetics though, surely?
“It was a blast actually because with the make-up, I’d never done too much of that before,” he says. “I did a thing called Horrible Bosses a few years back where I had a combover and all this make-up, but this was next level and the work that Mike Marino, the make-up artist, did in designing Oz was incredible.
“I mean I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, there’s no character I’ve played that I have less ownership over than I do over this one because I can at best claim 50pc of the ownership.
“There were six or seven pieces that went on individually and they fit so beautifully, but just the visage of the character, the scar, the size of the face, how he padded out the neck, how it moved with me, it was extraordinary.
“In fact, I didn’t really get the character at first at all, I was struggling to figure out what I could do with it and I was probably feeling a bit of pressure with Burgess and Danny and how could I make this my own. And then I saw the bust of what Mike Marino had created, and I thought OK, f***, this is beginning to make a bit of sense to me now.
“And then the first day we put the mask on and the body suit on, I felt like I had it. The walk, the accent, whatever the character is, it became at Warner Brothers that day.”
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Burgess Meredith as Penguin in the 1960s TV series Batman
When we spoke, Farrell hadn’t actually seen the finished film yet but, from his work on the set, had a strong idea of the mood Matt Reeves was looking for.
“It’s a dark world he’s created, it really is. Gotham is a broken place, there’s an enormous sense of pervasive criminality, not only high level organised crime, but petty criminality everywhere. The city is kind of in ruin and it’s a really dark time for the people of Gotham, and that’s where we meet this young Bruce Wayne, this young iteration of Batman.
“I think Matt’s brilliant, I really do. He’s an auteur, who also makes films for the masses, you know, and you don’t get that mix very much. You get it with Chris Nolan and you get it with Steven Spielberg, but you don’t get it that often. I’m mad into that guy.”
Farrell is speaking from Los Angeles, where he lives, and when he hears about the storms that are hitting us, reminisces about Atlantic weather. Last year, he spent several months in Mayo and Galway filming Martin McDonagh’s film The Banshees Of Inisherin with Brendan Gleeson and Barry Keoghan, who also makes a brief but significant appearance in The Batman.
“Yeah I’m still scarred from that shoot!” he says. “It was out west, we were in Inis Mór for five weeks and then we were on Achill for three or four weeks. It was great, the weather was lovely, for once, it was like Greece out there, it was beautiful.”
The Batman is in cinemas from today.
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