‘Penguin’ lessons: How HBO series avoided ‘giant franchise’ pitfalls

The last time a penguin was this serious of an awards contender, it was tap dancing with happy feet. Now, HBO’s “The Penguin,” fleshing out the origin story of the waddling, tuxedo-clad “gentleman mobster” after more than 80 years as one of the Caped Crusader’s best-known adversaries, has earned a staggering 24 Emmy nominations. For her spinoff to 2022’s big-screen hit “The Batman,” creator Lauren LeFranc brought an unusual perspective, burrowing deeply into new histories of twisted, impassioned characters — and stars Colin Farrell, Cristin Milioti and Deirdre O’Connell enthusiastically bought in.

“The people who’ve come before me, who’ve had the opportunity to tell a story about a gangster, they tended to be men,” said LeFranc. “Crime dramas, anything comic book-related, certainly with [predominantly] male characters, let alone someone who’s considered a villain, it’s hard to find a lot of women who’ve had that opportunity.”

LeFranc wanted to know everything about not just Oswald “Oz” Cobb (Farrell) but also the person who shaped him most, his upward-mobility-obsessed, dementia-suffering mother, Francis (O’Connell, in a role created for the series), and the person he would have to overcome in order to rise to power, his late mob boss’ daughter, Sofia Falcone (Milioti), in a version entirely different from the comics character.

Deirdre O’Connell in “The Penguin.”

(Macall Polay / HBO)

“Francis was based a little bit on my grandmother on my dad’s side, who’s Mexican and was an immigrant and had a lot of spite and anger, but was very driven and passionate,” LeFranc said.

“We definitely did talk about what that meant,” acknowledges O’Connell, “and the way her grandmother conducted herself like a queen.”

Francis and Oz are locked in a mother-son dance of death, as the wannabe crime lord feels constant pressure to succeed in her eyes. But the two are cursed by a horror from their past: As a boy, Oz killed both of his brothers, which Francis secretly knows.

All of this was news to the actor who’d played Oz in the movie and had first suggested the Penguin get the TV treatment. Farrell said his previous thoughts about Oz’s backstory weren’t “a million miles away from what Lauren created, but what she created was unique enough for me to learn more about Oz as a man.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

“The relationship between Oz and Francis was the cornerstone, the foundation around which I built everything that became Oz — the intimacy between the two, the deep need Oz always had to feel his mother’s love and earn her pride.”

All of that fit with LeFranc’s reimagining of a character usually depicted in a morning suit and top hat, with high-tech weaponry inside his umbrella: “In the comics, he has often come from a wealthy family,” she said. “We changed his name to ‘Cobb’ because ‘Cobblepot’ always suggested wealth and prestige. I personally can relate more to someone who comes from nothing and is hustling. A man like Oz is often not seen in the way he feels he deserves.”

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LeFranc’s backstories fed the idea that everyone is the hero of their own story. It’s certainly not hard to root for antagonist Sofia Falcone, who viewers learn was betrayed by her own father and committed to a decade of mental torture in Arkham Asylum. In a sense, she becomes the series’ co-hero — a hero who coolly slays almost her entire family in revenge.

Milioti said LeFranc’s “care and protectiveness” gave the actors freedom. “You’re able to go to those big places; it feels so real. It gives you carte blanche to go as deep as you want and get as detailed as you want.

“You know it when you see it, and you start drooling.”

Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti in “The Penguin.”

(Macall Polay / HBO)

Farrell’s cellular mutation into Oz has been widely discussed — the dialect, the physicality, the incredible prosthetic makeup by Mike Marino and his team, and how Farrell illuminates that full-body mask from within. Less discussed has been Milioti’s metamorphosis into the internally and externally scarred Sofia, hard as Gotham’s most brutal gangsters and free of the ties of conscience that could bind vengeful hands.

“There’s a certain point where she has nothing to lose, and that’s the scariest type of person,” said Milioti, previously best known for comedy (“How I Met Your Mother,” “Palm Springs”) and musical theater (“Once,” David Bowie’s “Lazarus”).

“I’d been looking to do something [in which] I could show a different color, and it reminded me a lot of doing theater because I didn’t feel boxed in. I could come in with the ideas I had and the feelings I was circling. We had this incredible hair and makeup department, they were so collaborative … It felt very not necessarily what I would expect a giant franchise to feel like.”

Tony winner O’Connell underwent her own transformation as Francis, and not just due to the character’s rough-hewn, New York-like Gotham dialect, courtesy of coach Jessica Drake. Oz’s mother has Lewy body dementia, a degenerative condition that affects thinking, memory and movement.

“It was very deeply important to me that I not sell it short at all,” O’Connell said. “Both of my parents suffer from dementia. I got lucky enough to find a woman who does [physical therapy] for people with Lewy [body dementia] and Parkinson’s, and people let me into their homes.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

“It’s so funny because I kind of look like my mom when I see [the show] now. Everybody said my dad had Alzheimer’s, but looking back, he probably had Lewy, the way his hallucinations worked, the guilelessness that came over him, and also the way that his rage manifested; how angry it made him to be that helpless. I wanted Francis to be able to hold her dignity in the worst time, when people have to give up their dignity that way.

“I felt that for her, and I was carrying that for my parents.”

Farrell had what he called his “crutch” — the physical transmogrification — which also sparked a germ of fear in him, of “being a one-trick pony,” he said. “Mike Marino’s genius was so apparent, it would easily sustain interest over five scenes or four scenes in the film. But can I sustain interest, can I find a way to actually make this living, breathing human being who is complex?

At first, Farrell had suggested to “The Batman” writer-director Matt Reeves that he play the Penguin with much more minimal makeup — “Maybe the Penguin’s 170 pounds and 5 foot 10, and Irish,” he jokes — but in the end it only deepened his belief that the rise of Oz Cobb could sustain a story of its own.

“I remember saying to [‘Batman’ producer Dylan Clark], like, on Week 2 of ‘The Batman,’ we should do a show on this. There’s so much more we could do with this.

“And then I was given the opportunity to do so much more, and I s— myself, absolutely.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)