Behind The Decision To Make Colin Farrell Unrecognizable

Matt Reeves didn’t start out wanting Colin Farrell to disappear behind a pile of prosthetics.

When his discussions with the actor began before the making of 2022’s The Batman, the primary focus was on the inspiration for Oz Cobb, not over whether Farrell should resemble comic book renderings of the classic DC villain for both the movie and the HBO series The Penguin that’s debuting Thursday.

“We talked a lot about Fredo. We talked about John Cazale in The Godfather, and the idea of maybe trying to give him a penguin nose, or doing something to kind of mess up Colin’s face to get the sense of somebody who’d been overlooked, somebody who had this ambition inside of him but who was mocked and who had been looked down upon,” recalls Reeves to Deadline. “All of a sudden one day [prosthetics designer] Mike Marino said, ‘Let me show you what I’ve been working on.’ Mike is an incredible artist, and he did this sculpture. I’m telling you, the sculpture was exactly the way that Oz looks right now. It’s incredible. And I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ We had never said, ‘Let’s just take Colin and turn him into something that we’ve never seen before.’ I said, ‘This is Colin Farrell. I got to now tell the studio he’s not going to look like Colin Farrell.”

When Hollywood typically asks an actor to change their appearance for a role, some semblance of their identity still remains. Despite an absurdly fake schnoz and some extra girth, Steve Carell was still recognizable in the 2011 movie Foxcatcher. And even with a fat suit (which in itself generated controversy over how Ryan Murphy should have simply cast an obese actress), there was no mistaking Sarah Paulson as Linda Tripp in 2016’s American Crime Story.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, about the Penguin screams Colin Farrell. The handsome visage that’s on full display in Apple’s Sugar has been replaced with a scared face, receding hairline, and a beak nose. He talks with a raspy New York accent. He limps from an unexplained childhood disorder.

As one reader who posted on Deadline says, “I thought maybe there would be flashbacks to when The Penguin was young but no. They should have just cast Alfred Molina who The Penguin ended up looking like, anyway.”

In other words, why cast a hot guy for an ugly part?

“Colin’s not talented because of his appearance,” argues Penguin showrunner Lauren LeFranc. “I’m sure that doesn’t hurt. But he’s such a soulful actor who can do comedy and drama, and so you still have that quality inside of Oz. I understand the question of why wouldn’t you just cast someone who you want to look like Oz. Obviously I’m quite biased, but after this experience and seeing what Colin can do, I realized Oz would be an inherently different character if he was not played by someone as talented and specific as Colin. He’s a really emotional, incredible actor, and Colin’s charm is really so much a part of Oz. I actually see Colin a lot through Oz now. I can’t speak for Colin in terms of what that feels like, but I do imagine it’s quite freeing for him in a way.”

Kind of. The Irish actor has already been quoted saying how “I never want to put that f*cking suit and that f*cking head on again,” and he fully admits to Deadline that “I didn’t enjoy watching” himself as a beastly-looking baddo.

“I am not there,” he acknowledges.

But Farrell also recognizes the upside to undergoing such a drastic change for the sake of art.

“When I looked into the mirror for the first time and I saw Oz looking back, it was really powerful,” recalls Farrell. “It was strange. You ever see the videos of cats looking at themselves in the mirror and seeing themselves for the first time? It was a bit like that. It’s my first time doing something like this, being that submerged and beneath such brilliant design and sculpting as Mike Marino did. There’s a kind of essence of possession. If you give yourself over to it, it tells you so much. You start to move a different way. You start to look a different way. You start to feel powerful. Your actual face isn’t there. So you almost don’t exist in a way. It wasn’t like I ever lost who I was or anything. But there was great permission to just throw paint at the wall with a kind of voraciousness that I hadn’t had the opportunity to do before. Sometimes maybe you hold yourself back, but this time there was no holding back. It did so much of the work for me.”

HBO, for its part, had no concerns about fans not wanting to see the Oscar-nominated actor looking so uncharacteristically uncomely.

“I was never nervous,” Sarah Aubrey, HBO Max’s Head of Originals, tells Deadline. “We got an early glimpse of Colin’s work as Oz in The Batman and knew that this was a powerhouse performance … ferocious, witty, vulnerable, diabolical. And all of that could be the jet fuel for an epic series.”

At the very least, Marino probably deserves a little recognition when the 2025 Creative Arts Emmys come around.

“I said to Mike, Colin is an extraordinary actor and he’s so subtle and he’s so beautiful, and if I lose any of that and it looks like a guy wearing makeup, this is the complete failure,” adds Reeves. “And Mike was like, ‘No, no one will ever know he’s wearing makeup. His expressiveness will all be completely Colin’s. You’ll never know this is makeup.’ And he was true to his word. What was interesting is that once Colin got into that makeup and he’d been working on the voice, it was like something clicked into place where a new person showed up, and that person was Oz.”