With The Penguin season 1 just wrapping up on HBO last Sunday night, fans are turning their attention to the crime lord’s return in DC’s upcoming The Batman 2. Colin Farrell recently talked about his role in the movie and how the character might change following the events of the TV show.
The actor said his Penguin has about five or six scenes in The Batman Part II, which isn’t due out until October 2026. He hasn’t even read the script yet though, and isn’t sure how his character’s meaty arc across eight episodes of the HBO spin-off will be brought to bear on the Batman reboot’s sequel. “I signed up for three Batman films, but I didn’t know if I’d be in the second film,” Farrell told Hollywood Reporter in a new interview. “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.”
The actor continued:
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.
While the success and critical acclaim of the HBO show provides a lot of extra room for The Batman Part II to play with the Penguin’s character, it will probably still be circumscribed by the fact that most of its potential movie-going audience will never have seen the show in the interim. But for fans at least, it should hopefully make Farrell’s character a lot more interesting and impactful than his lively but one-dimensional presentation in the last Batman movie.
More importantly, what are the chances that we get a season 2 of The Penguin sometime farther down the road? While Farrell previously told Total Film, “I never want to put on that fucking suit and fucking head again,” he recently told the Hollywood Reporter he’d be willing to return under the right circumstances.
“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,” he said. “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.”
