Gotham Season 3 Interview: Robin Lord Taylor Talks Musical Penguin Scene
The Amy Winehouse moment in the Gotham midseason premiere was unexpected and delightful. We talked to Taylor about its creation...
The Gotham midseason premiere was a great launch to the second half of Season 3, but Hallucination-Oswald’s performance of Amy Winehouse’s “Wake Up Alone” was a particular highlight. If you missed the episode, “How the Riddler Got His Name” sees Ed hallucinating a version of his former best friend, complete with a musical number. Check it out…
— Gotham (@Gotham) April 25, 2017The scene was not only just fun to watch (Taylor, as always, is a delight as Oswald), but was a big emotional moment for Ed, who admits that “killing you killed a part of me.” For fans of the comic, it also saw Oswald wearing the traditional Penguin outfit for the very first time. Taylor talked about the big moment at a Gotham press event earlier this month, saying:
You notice, in the scene, it’s the first time we introduce the top hat. And I’m wearing the traditional Penguin outfit … Before I was shot, I keep coming to Riddler and telling him, ‘I defined you.’ And in this episode, too: ‘I made you who you are.’ And then, weirdly, in his fantasy, he made the Penguin who he is. It was this really beautiful, meld of their two psyches and the connection that they have, which is my favorite thing that we brought out.
Another fun fact about the Winehouse scene? The Gotham cast and crew just happened to record it in the exact same studio Winehouse did in New York City. “Production randomly rented it out. The same booth,” Taylor said.
Now that we know Taylor can sing and that the Gotham production team knows how to pull off a musical number (well, we suppose we learned that lesson way back in Gotham Season 1), when are we going to get a Gotham musical episode? If there’s any show on TV that could pull it off, then it’s the weird, musically-inclined Gotham universe.
Written by
Kayti is a pop culture writer, editor, and full-time nerd who comes from a working class background. A member of the Television Critics Association, she specializes…