How Tim Burton Convinced Danny DeVito To Play The Penguin
Tim Burton had only one person in mind to play the Penguin in Batman Returns — Danny DeVito — but it took some effort to convince the actor to join the cast of the highly anticipated sequel. The character Oswald Cobblepot, a.k.a. the Penguin, is one of the main villains of Burton's follow-up to his successful 1989 Batman movie, and the role was written for the screen with DeVito specifically in mind. It would be like nothing the actor had ever done before, though, and it took Burton’s particular style of weirdness to inspire DeVito to put everything he had into the part.
At the time of his Batman Returns casting, Danny DeVito was a well-known and distinguished figure in pop culture, having won a Golden Globe and an Emmy for his performance on the TV sitcom Taxi and his appearances in iconic movies such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Romancing the Stone. Initially, the actor didn’t think it was in the cards for him to play the role of the Penguin in Tim Burton's Batman sequel. Despite the phenomenal box office achievement of the first Batman, which changed the game for Hollywood blockbusters, superhero movies were still not that prevalent, and DeVito’s previous work was primarily in comedy and drama, not fantasy.
Related: Batman Returns: Why Tim Burton Almost Didn't Direct
Tim Burton convinced Danny DeVito to play the Penguin in Batman Returns by creating an entirely new version of the character who was both mythic and tragically relatable. The filmmaker told DeVito he wasn’t going to be strictly faithful to the Penguin of the comics, where the criminal character mostly appeared as a dapper man with a cigarette and top hat. In Batman Returns, the Penguin would be an animalistic examination of the duality of man.
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