Colin Farrell Hated Filming That Final Penguin Scene As Much As You Did Watching It

While The PenguinThe finale was full of twists and turns as the series cemented its place in comic book TV royalty, perhaps unsurprisingly to learn that star Colin Farrell had a terrible time doing it. No prosthetic wang needed this moment to make things sad, but instead it’s a big performance shock in one of the series’ darkest moments.

Which is to say, when Oz makes the cold calculation that in order to stop his rivals from using anyone close to him to get to him, he must brutally beat poor young Vic to death with his bare hands. It’s a moment among many in the entire show that changed BatmanHe takes Oz from the almost likable, but violent person he was in the film to the ultimate terror—a change that Farrell apparently wanted to resist until the last minute.

“My whole thread, Colin’s, resists it because there’s a part of you that, no matter how dark a character you play and no matter how you accept swimming in those waters where it’s impossible to come back from the love of the audience, there’s a part of you that always wants the audience to be open to the idea that you can redeem yourself,” he recently told -Collider’s shock at Vic’s death. “No matter how dark your character is, you always want them to feel that maybe there’s some humanity left, that if the right thing is done in the right place at the right time, you can redeem yourself. I’m not sure that’s going to happen at the end of episode eight.” So, knowing that I was going into that kind of last level mentally and putting into the character the deep kind of brutality that’s portrayed in that scene, it was tough, man.

Farrell knew from the beginning that part of it The Penguin what he would do was completely kill any idea that Oz would ever remain the man he was Batmanbefore his return after a long period of time Batman Part II. But after working with Rhenzy Feliz for the better part of a year and reaching the final days of production, the actress not having a good time separating fiction from reality.

“There was very little conversation on set that night. We knew where we were. There was a slab we were sitting on by the water,” Farrell continued. “We knew our lines as players should, and we just went, and we did what we took, and we did as many angles as we had to do, and I hated it. I hated that situation. I really do. I even got angry. The sound of doing it—guess what?—you’d like it to sound when you watch it. It felt bad, it felt brutal, it felt completely insane, and it felt like Oz was reaching the point of no return.”

“You bring it home at night, and that was a sticky thing. “I had to take a shower with a wire brush at the end of that night,” he concluded.

As nervous as Farrell is, I hope the positive reaction to the finale will make him feel like he needs to scrub up a bit when he hits the showers this week. The Penguin now streaming entirely on Max.

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