“When I was finished I was like, ‘I never want to put that [flipping] suit on again,” Colin Farrell has said of his role in the upcoming TV show, The Penguin.
The crime-ridden world of Matt Reeves’ The Batman is set to expand with the upcoming TV spin-off, The Penguin, due to air this month. One person who found the show particularly oppressive, though, is title star Colin Farrell, who in an interview with Total Film was candid about the toll the production took.
Prefacing his comments by saying how grateful he was to be playing Oswald Cobblepot, one of Batman’s most famous villains, he then expressed his doubts about returning to the role for a second season. “I don’t know, man,” Farrell said. “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 [flipping] wanted it to be finished.”
Farrell first played his sleazy, gangland take on the Penguin in 2022’s The Batman, in which he was almost unrecognisable under a heavy layer of prosthetic makeup effects. It was an enormously watchable performance – hence why the character got his own spin-off series – though Farrell suggests that he was left fatigued by the hours spent in a makeup artist’s chair for The Penguin show.
Read more: The Batman review | A big, bold blockbuster movie, but…
Showrunner Lauren LeFranc had asked Farrell whether he’d consider returning for a second season, and the actor expressed his doubts. “Lauren said, ‘Look, if I could find a way that makes sense, would you talk about it?'” Farrell recalled. “I said, ‘Absolutely’. And maybe in a year I would. But when I was finished I was like, ‘I never want to put that [flipping] suit and that [flipping] head on again.'”
LeFranc recently said that The Penguin series will feed directly into The Batman Part II, which Reeves is currently working on. Echoing this, Reeves has also said that Farrell “will be part of the movie,” meaning Farrell is contractually obliged to put that flipping suit and head back on when the sequel goes into production next year.
“Colin [Farrell] will be part of the movie,” Reeves told SFX magazine earlier in September (via Variety). “We’ve shared [the script] as we’ve been going along with DC and the studio and they’re super excited. There are details that actually connect right into the way the next movie begins, and the way that Oz enters that world as we hand the baton back to Batman, and Batman is on another case.”
The Batman Part II is due for release in October 2026. Thankfully, The Penguin is out a bit sooner than that – it’ll debut in the US on the 19th September and the 20th September in the UK. Time will tell whether Farrell can be coaxed back for a second series.
