Colin Farrell not only has a massive physical transformation in The penguin — returning to the role of his The Batman the villain Oz Cobb, but also a straight-laced one, who replaces his famous Irish accent with that of a New York gangster.
At the HBO series' New York premiere on Tuesday, Farrell explained the key to this shift, joking, “For some reason 'Gefilte fish' became an anchor when the accent was starting to fade.”
“My dialect coach, Jessica Drake, has a library of thousands of accents from all over the world dating back to the ’30s and ’40s, so when we prepare for something, we start with where the character is from, listen to four or five different recordings from that region, then narrow it down to something that we think is good energetically, not just the sounds,” the star said. The Hollywood Reporter on the carpet. “There was a gentleman who was the manager of an apartment complex in the '80s; he was older, he looked like he was in his 60s, and he talked a lot about Gefilte fish. And so every time my accent started to change, she would call me back and I would say 'Gefilte fish,' and that was a little trick.”
The show is set after the events of the 2022 film The Batman — starring Robert Pattinson and Zoë Kravitz — and follows Farrell’s villain as he aims to take over Gotham’s criminal underworld. Showrunner Lauren LeFranc said the creative team — which includes executive producer Matt Reeves — discussed an appearance by Pattinson’s Batman but ultimately decided against it.
“If it made sense for our story and didn’t take away from the other characters, I think we would have been open to it, but we still felt like if Batman came in, we didn’t want to steal Oz’s thunder, and Oz certainly wouldn’t appreciate that,” LeFranc teased.
He also added that he doesn't see the show “as a supervillain story. I see it as a kind of grounded character drama with this very complicated man who is sometimes problematic, and he's very smarmy with a dark sense of humor. But I feel like it's very grounded, so there are no heroes or villains on our show; there are just flawed, complicated people.”
As a result, there were the first comparisons with The Sopranoson which executive producer Dylan Clark expressed his opinion.
“HBO has a long list of great gangster shows, The Sopranos it's one of them, obviously; The threadthere's a lot of it,” he said. “For me, it's a way of doing a gangster character in a place that's known for good gangster food, but it really comes from The Batman film and this amazing character that Colin and Matt created from the film that Lauren LeFranc detailed in a limited series.”
The penguinwhich also stars Cristin Milioti, Michael Kelly and Rhenzy Feliz, debuts Thursday on Max.
Neha Joy contributed to this article.