Matt Reeves’ Batman universe is far from a silly one, but apparently one source of inspiration for The Penguin’s look is on the sillier side.
Colin Farrell, if you didn’t know, doesn’t typically look how he does in The Penguin. No, it’s done by this thing called special effects make-up, as impossible as it might be to believe, obviously transforming the actor in such a way where you probably wouldn’t know it’s him unless you were told. Obviously his design has a bit of a mafia vibe about it, but as it turns out, that wasn’t necessarily the first port of call when it came to hunting for sources of inspiration for his look. In a recent interview with DiscussingFilm, The Penguin make-up designer Michael Marino shared that Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, of all things, is where some of the inspiration came from when designing the character.
“There was another fantasy character, which was also Bob Hoskins in [Who Framed] Roger Rabbit,” Marino said in the interview. “There is some kind of quality there that Matt [Reeves] had interest in that I thought was cool. But that also comes from sort of a noir feeling, ’30s type of person, because in Roger Rabbit you don’t really know what decade that is. It’s a strange 1930s, ’40s feeling, so I think that that noir thing came from that. And there were real gangsters, we have Al Capone, who’s also an influence. It’s all of these subliminal images and references [that] are all kind of melded into the subconscious of this character.”
It’s quite a funny film to draw from, especially when The Penguin has had a bit of a name change (from Oswald Cobblepot to Oz Cobb) to make sure The Batman felt more “grounded”, but I suppose it is more the look than the performance.
A sequel to The Batman is currently in the works, and was originally slated to be released almost exactly a year from now, but caught a delay earlier this year, so will now be out October 2, 2026.
