Editor’s Note: The following story contains spoilers for “The Penguin” episode eight.
Our interview over, it was Colin Farrell’s turn to ask questions. Standing up, he ushered me to one side of a crowded junket room. Farrell wanted my take on “The Penguin’s” finale. “I know it was dark,” he said, a hint of concern on those famous eyebrows. “But was it too dark?”
We were speaking in September, after the first episode had aired, when few people had seen, or foreseen, just how pitch-black HBO’s “The Batman” spin-off would become (HBO, like CNN, is a part of Warner Bros. Discovery).
Sure, life was cheap, Arkham Asylum was miserable and Gotham’s institutions were corrupt. So far, so normal for a story set in the Batman universe. But the series tracking Oz Cobb’s rise from the gutter to crime kingpin dived headfirst into the darkness in its home stretch. Audiences saw fratricide, attempted infanticide, and a kink involving Oz’s mother (somehow worse than it sounds). Then there was the murder of Oz’s right-hand man Victor Aguilar, which offered episode eight its most gut-wrenching scene.
Many months after filming it, Farrell still appears cut up. That day on set, he recalled, was the toughest of a long shoot interrupted by the SAG strike.
“Honest to God… I know it’s only acting, and geez, I’ve been doing it long enough. You go home and take your costume off and you go back to your life. But some scenes go in deeper than others,” he recalled.
To recap, Victor, played by Rhenzy Feliz, became tangled in Oz’s world when he was caught trying to steal Oz’s Maserati back in episode one. The naïve teenager, orphaned by the events of “The Batman,” was taken under Oz’s wing and pushed into increasingly high-stakes tasks by his new boss, proving his loyalty. Theirs was one of few relationships in “The Penguin” that didn’t flip from allegiance to betrayal every half an episode. But once Oz had bested the Falcones and Maronis to become Gotham’s top dog, Victor became a dangling thread, linking Oz back to his former life and his beloved mother. Victor had to go. And in the very moment of their victory, Oz strangled him on a park bench overlooking the city, leaving his body in the dirt and making the death look like a mugging.
“We had a lot of time to prepare for that and to think on it. There was a lot of road that was set between (Oz) and Victor and the friendship we had,” Farrell said.
“The crew were very invested in the story, genuinely – we’d spent a year on and off together – and the mood on the set that night was pretty dark,” he said. “Everyone, the focus pullers, the camera operators, the boom operators, craft service … it really wasn’t pleasant. We all knew what had to happen; it was only fiction. But it was so dark and it was so ugly and so unjustifiable.”
“We moved through it as quickly as we could,” Farrell added. “Everyone was very on point and we flew through it. But it was it was really, really ugly.”
The scene, which starts with Victor thanking Oz “for taking a chance on me” and calling him family, ends with him begging with his dying breaths. It’s brutal and unflinching, with a shock factor up there with some of the biggest TV deaths this century – the likes of Christopher Moltisanti, euthanized by his “uncle” (actually his cousin) Tony in “The Sopranos,” or Hank, Walter White’s brother-in-law, caught in the middle of a hit gone sideways in “Breaking Bad.”
Like Moltisanti’s death, Victor’s murder is driven by similar self-interest. “Family: It’s your strength. It drives you. F–k if it don’t make you weak too,” opines Oz, hand to Victor’s throat. “And I can’t have that no more.”
For all his disgust, Farrell said he could see how Oz justified himself. “One of the great pains of loving is that you’re more vulnerable and possibly more tenacious than you would ever be,” the actor said.
“You realize maybe when you have a kid that you’re capable of murder to protect your child. And you’re also capable of being hurt in ways that you never imagined as an individual, because of the love that you have for that child of yours.”
Oz makes the disturbing choice to kill off a weak spot rather than protect it (while keeping his other weak spot, his mother, on life support in miserable conditions, despite being brain dead). In doing so, he loses any claim to be the Robin Hood or Pablo Escobar-like character he believes himself to be, according to Farrell.
“He says to Victor in episode five or six, ‘Imagine being the man who helps people, and the people look to that makes a difference in peoples’ lives.’ So it’s a really important thing to (him) and I think it’s probably where he exists at his most beneficent self. I think it’s quite sincere that he does want to help people; that he knows what it’s like to live under the boon of poverty.”
But, Farrell added, “push to shove, if there’s a choice between serving himself and serving others, he would always go for self first.”
By the end of the series, Oz had proved as much. Alone at the top of the world with no further to rise, there’s only one direction The Penguin can go. We’ll have to wait until “The Batman Part II” in 2026 to see how far he can fall.
