Colin Farrell Details His ‘Weird’ Transformation as the Penguin at N.Y.C. Premiere: ‘I Look in the Mirror and None of Me Was There’

Colin Farrell confessed how “weird” it was to transform into the comic book villain The Penguin during the Tuesday, Sept. 17, New York City red carpet premiere for the series centering on the character he first played in The Batman.

Farrell, 47, called catching a glimpse of his transformation into Oz Cobb startling during a red carpet chat with PEOPLE and other outlets.

“Do you ever see cats looking at themselves in the mirror? How they recoil and they just don’t know [it’s them]?” he said, adding, “It was strange.”

Despite the dramatic costumes and makeup, he added, “It’s not like I ever fully lost sense of myself, but it was a very powerful thing to know yourself a certain way for 45 years and to see a reflection. And it also kind of made me aware of how much I identified with how I look.”

“As soon as I look in the mirror and none of me was there, then, I had more of a blank slate than I usually have [going]  to work,” he added, before crediting showrunner Lauren LeFranc and her team of writers to fill that “blank slate.”

“It was amazing,” he added. “It was really, really powerful. It was something very powerful and very kind of hypnotic to the experience.”

In a May interview with The Jess Cagle Show with Julia Cunningham, the Oscar nominee praised the makeup department’s work for turning him into a “marionette” that he was able to animate.

The Sugar star credited artist Mike Marino with transforming the actor into the Penguin. “He created this beautiful puppet and I got to animate it, and it was of joy,” Farrell said of the artist, who previously worked with Farrell on The Batman in 2022.

The True Detective actor also told Variety in January 2023  he craved more opportunities to play the character after working with Marino and makeup artist Mike Fontaine for only a handful of scenes in The Batman.

“Honest to God, any thought I had about an extended series was to do with Mike Marino’s work. I just knew there was so much to do with it — age it up, age it down,” he said.

The show was ordered straight to series in March 2022, almost immediately after the Robert Pattinson-led take on the superhero was released in theaters.

Although Pattinson’s Batman will not be in the series, the eight-episode series stars Cristin Milioti, Rhenzy Feliz, Michael Kelly, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Deirdre O’Connell, Clancy Brown and Michael Zegen. It picks up right after the events of The Batman, and shows how Oz tries to take a leadership role in the Gotham City underworld.

The Penguin premieres on Thursday, Sept. 19, at 9 p.m. on HBO and Max.