Colin Farrell on Returning for a Possible Season 2 of ‘The Penguin’

After an incredible season of eight intense episodes, HBO’s The Penguin wrapped up on November 10, 2024, with an impressive finale. Fans and critics alike have praised the series, especially Colin Farrell’s standout performance as The Penguin and Cristin Milioti’s role as Sofia Falcone.

While we won’t spoil anything from the finale here, now that the season has ended, the cast and creators have started sharing insights on the series’ future.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Colin Farrell discussed the possibility of a second season and shared the conditions under which he’d consider returning to his role if the show moves forward. For all the details, read on!

Colin Farrell’s journey as the Penguin is fascinating. He first took on the role in Matt Reeves’ The Batman, where Reeves praised his performance, saying:

Colin is a really beautiful, empathic person. And so to live in that darkness, and then on top of that, to have all that latex put on day after day, I know that as much as he loved the role, it was also a kind of hell at the same time.

In a past interview, Farrell once said, “I never want to put on that suit and head again,” so The Hollywood Reporter asked him about this comment:

There was that quote that went viral where you said you never wanted to put the makeup on again. 

Some writer took that out of its energetic context. I was bitching to anyone who’d listen to me. It’s the way I speak sometimes — “I can’t wait to finish this” — that kind of thing. I get anxious right now just thinking about sitting in the chair for hours.

But I always loved the material, and it was never lost on me the privilege I felt to inhabit a character that’s lived so long in comic book form originally and then through various iterations on TV and in film.

However, things have clearly changed, as Farrell’s response about returning for a potential second season is now very different. He even shared an explanation for why his perspective shifted:

If there’s a great idea [for season two], and the writing was really muscular and as strong or stronger on the page than it was the first season, of course I would do it. For me, the bar for success is not very high. It’s, ‘Do most people like it?’ — just the simplicity of that.

I love being in things that are critically approved — it’s much better than the alternative — but I’ve been around long enough [to know] that it’s the audience who are really the most important critics.

As you can see, Farrell is open to returning as The Penguin, but the script for a second season would need to be outstanding. Whether that will happen remains uncertain, but before we wrap up, here’s one more detail:

Do you have a scene from the season you’re most proud of?

I have a little bit more objectivity viewing this show than I usually have watching anything I’m a part of, by virtue of the obvious — I’m totally buried beneath three hours and 20 pounds of prosthetics. I don’t quite squirm as violently watching Oz as I do watching other characters I’ve played.

Having said that, it’s still hard for me to pick a favorite. But his relationship with his mother [Deirdre O’Connell] was something that drew me to the material more than some of the scenes that might’ve been more entertaining or electrifying.

The scene when Oz comes home and his mother is in the bath, her dementia has taken hold, and he’s helpless in the face of it. She asks him to kill her before she gets much worse, but she is the driving force in his life.

She is his absolute hero and his inspiration and the source of a love and acceptance that he deeply wants to feel yet he’s never really gotten from her. But as long as she’s alive, he always has the opportunity of making her proud. So the idea of extinguishing the light of her life is something that is horrifying to him. I think it’s the most honest that Oz is in the whole show.

Is there anything you would like to eventually experience with this character? 

Not really. I certainly don’t expect anything. I signed up for three Batman films, but I didn’t know if I’d be in the second film. Matt Reeves is a brilliant writer and an extraordinary filmmaker, and what I’m most excited-slash-nervous about in the second film is not what Oz does — or what predicaments he finds himself in, or what moments of success he gets to experience — but what his voice is.

How is his personality? It was forming and changing in the limited series, and, by the end of the eight episodes, it’s concretized into something else. There is a degree of almost delusion psychopathy present in the last scene. So how is that taken up in the second film? I was told I have five or six scenes. I don’t have any hopes or any expectations. I’m really an open book, and that’s the way I get excited by shit or not.

I think sometimes actors, if they have a career that has a certain length of time, they sometimes get to make too many decisions. Which isn’t to say I won’t push back or argue or fight in Oz’s corner — I do believe I know him better than anyone now.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

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