The Penguin, a limited series centered on the rise of Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb in Gotham’s crime world, is a character study. In it, we see Oz just a week after the events in Matt Reeves’ The Batman. One of the events in that film was the death of Carmine Falcone, leaving a power vacuum that Oz seeks to fill.
Showrunner Lauren LeFranc wanted to delve into why Oz had such a thirst to become a kingpin. “I don’t think people seek power just to seek power,” she said in a press conference that Reactor attended. “I think they seek power because of a deeper want or a deeper void inside of them.”
LeFranc decided to “build a mother figure” to give Oz that motivation. “I thought about this idea that Oz wants to make his mother proud, and he needs her love and affection, and she’s withholding,” she said. “And I started to ask myself why she would be withholding, and that’s something that we reveal deeper in the season. That felt like a personal connection to me. It felt like everyone can relate to some level of what it is to have a complicated family life, and root it in that.”
The character LeFranc came up with is Francis Cobb, who was inspired by her own grandmother. Francis, according to LeFranc, is “a really complicated, bristly emotional, tough, broad.” She added later on that she “also wanted the relationship to be weird and twisted, a little bit verging on Oedipal, to understand Oz in a deeper way too, to have just some form of distorted relationship.”
Francis is played by Deirdre O’Connell, who had an instant connection with Farrell when she first saw him in full Penguin makeup.
“The second I saw [Colin Farrell] in [his] full regalia, I felt like, ‘Oh, game on. Oh, there’s my boy,’” she said at the press conference. “It just dropped something in for me that I don’t think you can always expect will happen, and it often doesn’t happen, and you have to work on it, and then you have to find each other and create a kind of intimacy. But there was a weird magic that I felt hit by […] we just started having so much fun immediately, and it had partly to do with the fact that he was Oz.”
Farrell also said later on that Oz’s mother “was the greatest influence in his life,” though he added that “there was no amount of love, I think, that he could receive, even from her, that would have ameliorated the pain that he didn’t know how to manage within himself. And that’s something that comes out later, and in this tale, over eight hours, comes out in all sorts of grotesquely consequential ways.”
We can see Oz and his mom’s relationship unfold when The Penguin premieres on HBO and Max on September 19, 2024.
