While Colin Farrell said he was “grateful” to play the Penguin in the upcoming HBO series of the same name, he's not sure if he'd ever want to “put that f**king suit and that f**king head on again.”
The actor spoke openly about the intensity of the role in a recent interview with Total movie magazineresponding to the idea of returning for a second season of The penguinif he gets the renewal: “I don't know, man.
“Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but it got to me a little bit. Towards the end, I was bitching and moaning to anyone who would listen, saying I fucking wanted it to end. I tried to remind them that I had a 'grumpy gratitude,'” Farrell explained. “I was still grateful and honored, I grew up watching Burgess Meredith [who played the villainous role in the 1960s TV series]and then Danny DeVito [in Tim Burton’s 1992 film Batman Returns] He was my Penguin, so being part of the lineage of that narrative, I felt really privileged.”
However, “in the end”, the actor was ready to close everything, between the prosthetics, the suit and the mental state he was in.
“It's not that I didn't know who I was, and I was going out and burning cars and stuff, but… if you take what Matt Reeves created and then what Lauren [LeFranc, showrunner] what did Mike do? [Marino, prosthetics and make-up designer] done and put them all together, it was a really powerful experience,” Farrell said.
“Lauren said, 'Look, if you could find a way that made sense, would you talk about it?' And I said, 'Absolutely,'” the actor added of a potential second season. “And maybe, in a year, I would. But when I was done, I was like, 'I never want to wear that f**king dress and that f**king head again.'”
Although the series is a spin-off of Matt Reeves' 2022 film The Batmanthe director said previously SFX Magazine that fans shouldn't expect to see Robert Pattinson's Batman in the TV project.
“I feel like it's an extension of what's fundamentally there. We know this is Batman's world,” Reeves said of the series. “You're going into a different alley. So the specter of Batman is there. The specter of the Riddler is there. The specter of everything that happens in the last movie is there. It informs it. And that's exactly where we start.”
The penguin will debut on HBO and Max on September 19.