Colin Farrell Really Loves That “Piece of Shit” Oz Cobb

Colin Farrell is very fond of Oz Cobb, the crime boss he played in Matt Reeves’ The Batman and last year’s HBO Max spinoff show, The Penguin.

“I love that piece of shit. I love Oz. I love him,” Farrell told Hamnet actress Jessie Buckley during an Actors on Actors interview for Variety, explaining that he becomes so immersed in the role that he could sit and talk to her for 12 hours in the Penguin makeup and not break character.

Farrell revealed that he knew he’d become quite protective of Cobb when he considered pulling a kind of “Andy Kaufman-light” stunt on a chat show by giving an interview in-character, only to change his mind when he realized that he didn’t want Cobb to become a joke. This extended to meeting young fans while inhabiting Cobb, as he felt that too much behind-the-scenes access might undermine the character’s mystery.

The actor, who recently starred in Netflix’s dark comedy Ballad of a Small Player, also elaborated on how he was able to find the character of Cobb within himself after donning the DC villain’s mask.

“The last thing I want to say is that the mask allowed the real me to come out,” Farrell cautioned. “But I certainly have felt ugliness in me. I can feel moments of envy, or I can feel anger. It isn’t being born in the moment. It’s something from fucking seven generations ago. Because my face was covered, I was given permission — through being obscured, I was greenlit to experience a kind of revelation. When I saw the face, I started to feel a sense of sympathy.”

Despite the critical acclaim that was heaped on Farrell’s performances as Cobb, The Penguin was initially designed as a limited series, and though Farrell knows that “the powers that be” are considering a second season of the show, he doesn’t know if one would work in the current context of Matt Reeves’ Batman universe.

“It conveniently worked that the death at the end of The Batman and the devastation within Gotham opened up a power vacuum that then Oz could try and capitalize on,” Farrell told Comicbook earlier this year. “That was perfect for the parallel eight hours that we had.”

Whether The Penguin returns to our TV screens remains to be seen, but we’ll definitely see Farrell’s Gotham power player again in The Batman Part II, which is set to start filming next May.