Inside Colin Farrell's incredible transformation for The Penguin

One of the most impressive elements of Matt Reeves' 2022 film The Batman was the remarkable prosthetics job that turned Colin Farrell into underworld figure Oz Cobblepot — aka The Penguin. The famous comic book villain looked more terrifying than ever before, and a great deal more realistic than the Danny DeVito version from Batman Returns.

Farrell is donning that exquisite make-up design again for the new HBO series The Penguin, which traces what happened to Oz after the events of The Batman. In the wake of the death of crime lord Carmine Falcone at the hands of The Riddler, there's a void in the underworld of Gotham — a void Oz wants to fill.

The eight-part series brings Farrell into the leading man spotlight and he was joined in his return by Mike Marino — the same artist who designed Farrell's prosthetics for the movie. In 2022, Farrell told Yahoo UK that he "very much shared [the role] 50/50 with Mike Marino".

In that 2022 interview, Farrell explained that his first make-up test took six hours to apply courtesy of a team of around 12 people. By the end of the production, Marino and his team had managed to finesse the make-up to the extent that what had become a four-hour job could now be done in just two. "To be just buried deep under all of that make-up, there was an incredible sense of creative freedom that I was gifted by being submerged," he explained.

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By the time Farrell got to make The Penguin, he was even more impressed by Marino's work. Speaking in 2023, he told Gold Derby that "the make-up is somehow, in a very subtle way, even better — it's just more perfected".

Marino went into a lot of detail on how the prosthetics worked in an interview with the Stan Winston School of Character Arts. He explained that every bit of Farrell's face was covered in prosthetics, other than his forehead. Everything had to change, too, midway through production. During the pandemic lockdowns, Farrell lost around 30 pounds in weight, which had to be added back on with prosthetics.

The existing design for Farrell's fat-suit and neck prosthetics now overlapped by four inches. All of the work was wasted. Marino was undeterred, but had to make everything all over again. He said: "I life-cast him again at his house. I went back to my studio. I glued on the make-up to the life-cast. And then I mimicked it side by side. I measured it, and we remade everything."

The designer, though, was very complimentary of Farrell's work. "I've never seen anybody do what he did in that make-up. Between him and Eddie Murphy, they're just the best people in make-up that I've ever seen," he said. "He would go in the mirror and do things, make expressions, and see what worked for him. It doesn't look strange when he's laughing and opening his mouth really wide; it looks really mobile."

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Back in 2022, Farrell was just as excited about the prosthetics as Marino. "It never got old for me. You hear stories about Jim Carrey in the Grinch suit. That sounds hellacious. He was six or eight hours some mornings," he said. "But even the four-hour sessions sitting in the chair, I didn't mind it because I just knew what the result was. I knew the reward was huge. What I was being a canvas for was an absolute privilege."

Farrell's opinion does seem to have soured somewhat due to the intensity of the production on The Penguin. In a recent interview, Farrell said: "When I finished I was like, ‘I never want to put that f***ing suit and that f***ing head on again'." He conceded that the make-up "got in on me a little bit", but said he might be willing to return in the future.

Much like Daniel Craig's infamous comments about never returning to James Bond in the wake of Spectre in 2015, we should take this with a pinch of salt. Of course Farrell doesn't want to wear the make-up again right away, but it's very likely that he will do so again when Reeves starts production on his sequel to The Batman.

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Earlier this month, HBO released a clip on X (formerly known as Twitter) in which a time-lapse video showed the lengthy process of Farrell becoming Oz. It makes clear the level of team effort required to create the remarkable effect.

There's no denying that Marino's work is spectacular. His design and expertise has transformed one of the world's most famous faces into something grotesque, but still believable. Farrell's performance as Oz is terrific, but he gets a lot of help from the make-up on his face and body.

If the early reviews are anything to go by, The Penguin is a mob story for the ages, inspired by The Sopranos and Goodfellas as much as anything from the pages of DC Comics. But it has one foot in the entertainingly fantastical excesses of comic book design — and a lot of that comes from Farrell's exceptional physical transformation. Mike Marino, take a bow.

The Penguin premieres on Sky Atlantic on 20 September.

This article originally appeared on Yahoo TV UK at https://uk.news.yahoo.com/colin-farrell-the-penguin-transformation-141903134.html