Ahead of the series debut of The Penguin, Colin Farrell says his “powerful experience” shooting it might keep him from a second season.
With the premiere of The Penguin just about a week away, some are already ready for the announcement of the second season. Really, it wouldn’t be terribly surprising to hear about the greenlight this month, as so often happens after the first episode airs. But, as it turns out, Colin Farrell himself isn’t even sure if he would return for The Penguin, saying the character took a toll on him.
Colin Farrell of course is reprising the role of Penguin from 2022’s The Batman but a third outing may not be in his deck. As he told Total Film, “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 f*cking wanted it to be finished. I tried to remind them that I had ‘grumpy gratitude.’ I was still grateful, and still honored – I grew up watching Burgess Meredith, and then Danny DeVito was my Penguin – so being a part of the lineage of that storytelling, I really did feel privileged. But by the end of it…”
That’s not a guaranteed no but Colin Farrell’s hesitation at this point to return for a second season of The Penguin isn’t looking good. Thankfully, he at least wasn’t constantly taking the character home with him or getting involved to the point where he started embodying Oz. “It’s not like I didn’t know who I was and I was going out and burning cars and shit, but…if you take what Matt Reeves created and then what Lauren [LeFranc, showrunner] did and what Mike [Marino, prosthetics and make-up designer] did and put them all together, it was a really powerful experience.”
Obviously much of the success of The Penguin – and if it even gets the go-ahead for season two – relies on Colin Farrell. Matt Reeves has already stated that you shouldn’t expect to see the likes of Bruce Wayne or Riddler to help carry the load, as their stories have been told. So if Colin Farrell is already talking about waddling away, that could spell immediate doom for the show before it even debuts on September 19th.
Will you be checking out The Penguin when it premieres next week?