HBO’s Tough Bird: ‘The Penguin’ Takes Flight with Skillful Invisible FX

Embracing the opportunity to bring his version of an iconic comic book villain to life, Colin Farrell dons prosthetic makeup and body suits as the titular character for the new HBO series The Penguin. The show, which is set up as a sequel to the 2022 feature The Batman, finds Oswald Cobblepot (a.k.a. the Penguin) making a play to seize the reins of Gotham’s crime world.

“I worked a long time on Oswald Cobb’s [Farrell] voice, because you got a glimpse of it in the movie, but we’re spending so much more time with Oz, so there is an opportunity to evolve him,” says Lauren LeFranc, the series’ executive producer and showrunner. “I always wanted him to be charming and funny, but you can also see through the seams of who he is as a man. As you spend more time with him, we unpack who he is emotionally in a deeper way. I do view this as a character study of this man as well as a look at toxic masculinity and masculinity in general. It’s important to me that we didn’t make you idolize him. Oz is a narcissist. Narcissists have this ability to make everyone around them feel that you’re living in their glow until you do something that doesn’t serve them, and then things change.”

Gotham Immersion

LeFranc says the series’ eight hour-long episodes allow viewers to get an in-depth tour of Gotham. “Matt Reeves [executive producer] had created an incredible and beautiful world of Gotham at night [for The Batman],” she says. “We had the opportunity to show you different aspects of Gotham in the daytime. The goal for me was to make sure that Gotham felt like a character unto itself and that you felt what it is to have real people living there. Obviously, we’re seeing the world through Oz’s lens, but we wanted to make sure that we’re showcasing different neighborhoods of the city. We also inherited this terrible flood that happened in The Batman where the seawall collapsed. It’s a city that is suffering, and we took that as an opportunity to talk about class disparity.”

The production’s visual effects team played a huge role in making Gotham come alive throughout the series. “The trick with our visual effects is to make you not see them,” she says. “The goal was [that] the visuals feel seamless and integrated in such a way that you think everything is practical and that the city we are in is Gotham. We shot in New York, so we embraced that aesthetic, which is an incredible place to shoot. We also want you to know that Oz is a man, but we have little touch-ups here and there. We’re not a superhero show. We want you to feel that we’re a grounded drama.”

‘In visual effects, we try to force physics to do something different, and that’s usually what makes it look fake.’

— VFX supervisor Johnny Han

The prosthetic makeup created for Oz’s face was created by Mike Marino, who also brought his expertise to The Batman movie. “It was actually more challenging to do this makeup for the show because Colin is in it three or four times longer and closer,” says the makeup designer. “Someone who doesn’t want to wear makeup is not going to help the project. Colin cannot be more amazing to work with because he loves filmmaking and special effects. It’s this perfect marriage of actor and effects coming together.”

There is a revealing moment when Farrell is 95% covered in prosthetics. “The nude scene was so difficult to do,” recalls Marino. “We had built a flesh hairy suit that added on the makeup so he is completely naked. That is an entire prosthetic, which is so incredibly hard to do because there’s nowhere to hide anything, and it’s shot [with] daylight outside. There are no shadows. But when he’s in the clothing, we built a suit that adds a significant amount of weight to him. It’s almost like pants and a zipper goes on. We built it to move and function in a certain way and then the clothing goes on. That goes on after the makeup is done, and the makeup overlaps onto that suit. But the nude stuff is a whole other bag!”

Over six months, approximately 3,000 visual effects shots were created by Accenture Song VFX, Pixomondo, ReDefine, Stormborn Studios, Frost FX and SSVFX. VFX supervisor Johnny Han explains, “We definitely try to take us into negative space. We try to look into tunnels and under bridges. There are elevated trains screaming overhead which we don’t know where they’ve come from or where they are heading to. But they pierce through the city left and right.”

The third episode of the series features a flashback to the day of the city’s massive flood. Han says, “A lot of the shots in The Batman have a bird’s-eye view of it all, and I said to Lauren, ‘Let’s make sure this feels like Victor Aguilar’s [Cobb’s protégé played by Rhenzy Feliz] point of view and have that closeness to the danger.’”

A different approach was required to assist editorial. “The tricky thing about water is it will do what water is designed to do,” Han recalls. “In visual effects, we try to force physics to do something different, and that’s usually what makes it look fake. We wanted to deliver the flood in what I call ‘digital dailies’ to the editor, where even though in the storyboards we cut back to it three or four times, we knew that it would be intercut with Victor. We said, ‘We’re going to simulate, at a postviz level, a flood, so that we feel the speed of the water is what physics would do: The water would reach the end of the street in so many seconds.’ It’s as if the editor was getting a long clip of dailies and they could chop it up however they felt but weren’t allowed to speed it up or slow down the clip. This is the way to go when working with large simulations.”

Creating Atmosphere

The shots needed to feel alive and convey the proper scope of the subject matter. “Smoke and atmosphere are our best friends as they add depth, scale and realism,” observes Han. “One of my most common creative notes is when I say something looks too vacuist. It feels like there is a vacuum between me and that building. There needs to be air, atmosphere, lights need to glow, and I need to feel rolling fog and movement. It helps to add life and movement when you look at buildings which don’t move!”

Of course, practical sets and locations had to be digitally replaced on occasion. “Not that we didn’t like the work, but things are discovered in post from a story standpoint,” says the VFX supervisor. “We definitely run with what was built, and Kalina Ivanov [production designer] and her team were amazing and provided a lot of their designs to us as 3D SketchUp models; that was hugely helpful [for] us to know basically the blueprints of these crazy sets.”

Overall, the show’s major visual effects challenge was to be invisible. “How do we weave in just enough visual effects to get you to follow the story a little more, love the characters a little more and be engaged into the action a little bit more without it becoming about visual effects?” says Han. “The things that are nearly imperceptible are subconsciously still influential. There are things that are not actually seen but felt. There’s always something new about filmmaking to learn, and I am glad that I got to be along for the ride.”

The Penguin is currently streaming on Max.