Penguin actor Colin Farrell on becoming The Batman villain: "It's dressing up on steroids"

gamesradar.com:

The Batman brings the villain Penguin back to the big screen – but you may have a hard time working out who's playing the character. Despite the grotesque outer appearance, that's actually the certifiably slim Colin Farrell underneath a whole lot of make-up. In fact, the actor spent four hours a day getting into the skin of Penguin, while the initial tests took eight hours to get the look right.

Speaking to Total Film in anticipation of The Batman, Farrell walked us through getting into the character. Turns out, the first discussions he had with director Matt Reeves were about the character's psychology, with the look coming much later.

"Every discussion until I saw what Mike Marino, the makeup artist, had designed, was considering the character's psychology and where he was at this stage of his criminal career. None of it was about inhabiting this character that ended up being in the film," he says. 

Those first conversations were very much about how this version of Penguin had not "fully embodied the archetypical power" classically seen in the comic books. Instead, Penguin's a mid-tier mafia member, running a club but still with a boss, John Turturro's Carmine Falcone, above him. Farrell worked on the character's voice with a dialect coach, and the groundwork was laid. "I knew where I was going with that," he says, "but I wasn't fully comfortable until I saw the makeup. When I saw the makeup, it just all became really, really clear."

"I was somewhat bigger when I met Matt," he continues, "and he liked the weight that I had on for a TV series called The Northwater. I played a whaler and I put on quite a bit of weight. And Matt was like, 'Oh, yeah, I love it. I think that's Oz!' And I was like, 'Nah, man, let's have a