Colin Farrell Needed His Own Igloo to Keep His ‘Penguin’ Makeup from Melting

Why endure hours of work every day to make a handsome movie star unrecognizable? Farrell, Matt Reeves, and prosthetics makeup designer Mike Marino discuss creating Oswald Cobb.

On day two of shooting “The Penguin” Colin Farrell, dressed in his full prosthetic makeup and body suit of his character Oswald “Oz” Cobb, aka the Penguin, turned to executive producer Dylan Clark and asked how many shooting days were left. According to the actor, Clark was mildly concerned: Was the reality just starting to set in for the actor that it would be far more physically demanding and time-consuming to transform into the Penguin as the star of an eight-episode television series than it was to play a supporting role in “The Batman” movie? Farrell would still have 80-plus shooting days remaining, in which he would have to go through the daily routine of being turned into the Penguin.

“It was an undertaking, man. It took a year,” said Farrell, referring to how production was paused due to the IATSE and teamster strike. “I had a tent that had three industrial air conditioners, that were outside the tent pumping air in. It was freezing in there.”

That is not an exagerration. According to prosthetic makeup designer and executive producer Mike Machino, Farrell was sweating so much, regardless of the weather, from the weight of the body suit and prosthetics glued to his face, he would need to retreat to near freezing temperatures to both stay comfortable, but also protect Marino’s work.

“And not to be glib about the consequences of the strike on so many families and so many professionals and artisans within our business, and the crew particularly [Farrell was a vocal supporter and picket line presence during the strikes], but the fucking strike saved us. If we had a shot that in 100 degrees in the New York summer, we would have been in a jam, we would have lost hours a day [having to] reapply [the makeup],” said Farrell. “The igloo kept me sane as well because it just meant I’d sit on my own, they’d say cut and I’d just leave the set, go out zip, zip [mimicking the sound of the tent zipper], get into the igloo, and I’d just sit there staring into space for 20 minutes until they were ready again.”

According to Marino, people on set who were intimated by the normally affable Farrell. The Penguin was scary, and while Farrell didn’t necessarily stay in character, he found it easier to maintain Oz’s dialect and walk. Executive producer Matt Reeves, who directed “The Batman,” recalled the first day of camera tests Farrell and Marino did for the movie, in which no one on the crew knew it was actually Farrell. Marino’s work was so naturalistic it was hard to detect it was an actor in makeup — Farrell even wandered into a Starbucks in character without calling any attention.

The physical and time demands on Farrell for “The Penguin” were such that production had to make scheduling concessions to accomodate the two-and-half to five hours (five hours was only for the rare days the Penguin was naked and showing more skin, such as the dramatic scene in Episode 1). Shooting days were designed to keep Farrell out of the first shot, and he’d need be written out of the schedule entirely every third or fourth day.

“You can only film two to three days in a row,” said Marino. “You’re gluing an industrial type of glue to [Colin’s] face, and then taking it off, cleaning it, rubbing it, even though it’s safe materials, it’s on and off, on and off, and you gotta give the skin a rest.”

Considering all this, it begs the question, why take a Hollywood star, especially one known for his good looks, and put him through such physical and time-consuming demands just to make him unrecognizable? Reeves admitted he had similar questions when he saw Marino’s first Penguin sculpture for “The Batman.” Reeves had initially described Oz to Marino as someone who outwardly was like actor John Cazale’s Fredo character in “The Godfather,” someone who was constantly underestimated but inwardly had a “dark ambition that comes from some brokenness in him that can’t be filled.”

“I was startled [by] the sculpture, I always thought that Colin would look like Colin, we would just do subtle alterations, you know, this kind of giving him a little bit of character that explained a bit of the origins of this character emotionally,” said Reeves, when he was a guest on an upcoming episode of the Toolkit podcast. “What Mike did was transform him entirely. It actually scared me. I was like, ‘Wait a minute, but this has to be Colin. Are we going to be able to see Colin’s performance? He’s such a beautiful actor.”

What Reeves quickly learned was how far modern prosthetics makeup had come in recent years, the light weight, pliable materials in the hands of a master like Marino meant he could preserve the performance, and “the soul” of Farrell as a performer. Reeves makes comparisions to how his eyes were opened by WETA’s performance capture work when he was making the “Planet of the Apes” films, except that with prosthetics nothing had to be translated or altered in post-productions, Farrell’s emotional powerhouse performance was present on set and in-camera.

“The expressive parts of this are Colin, there’s no impediment physically to those things that create emotion, which is what you see in his face,” said Reeves, who recalled the moment he first saw an iPhone video of Farrell having combined the body suit, prosthetics, walk, and dialect. “It was as if another presence was born, something that didn’t exist before was released, somehow being freed from his physicality and seeing himself as this other person.”

Reeves description dovetails with Farrell’s first private experience in the makeup, having gone into a room by himself to look in the mirror.

“I was like one of those YouTube cats you see looking at themselves in the mirror and having an existential crisis. Like what is that looking back at me? It was the strangest thing,” said Farrell. “But you know, [after] five minutes I knew that it was all fair game [as an actor], I just honest to God, I wasn’t locking down any expressions.”

Farrell repeatedly insists he is not limited as an actor, and the genius of Marino’s work gave him full range of facial expressions, allowing him even to show when his character was hiding emotions. From the beginning, he was mentally able to fully focus on the demands of the script, not his prosthetics.

Marino politely tells a slightly different version, the artisan having become use to how magnamous Farrell is in his description of how Marino’s prosthetics lack any restrictions. It’s Marino’s experience that for prosthetics to truly work it has to be collaboration with actor to figure out how to maintain what is most expressive about an actor’s face, and make adjustments accordingly.

“I’m not blowing any smoke here, I never met an actor who’s this patient, understanding, talented, and expressive once the makeup is on,” said Marino of Farrell. “He really used the makeup. He really made his character come through subtleties.”

Early on Marino would take photos of Farrell in extreme, often silly, facial poses, in order to study his face and determine what was most expressive about it, and therefore how to tailor the prosthetics. In the case of the Penguin, Marino left the middle of Farrell’s forehead largely untouched, in addition to sections under his eye lids and around the mouth. Beyond that, only the top of Farrell’ ears and hands were his own, every other part of the actor was covered by pliable prosthetics that moved with his muscles and skin.

“I couldn’t have a successful makeup without someone who’s doing what he’s doing in the makeup,” said Marino. “He has to learn what looks the best, what expressions are the best, they’re memorized in a sense in his head, so he doesn’t have to keep checking. And if we see something, we have a great relationship where I go, ‘Hey, man, this thing is happening, maybe do this other expression,’ and then that’s in his mind. He’s helping the limitations of the prosthetics by doing different expressions, so it’s a team effort.”

Putting aside the five hours of makeup and hair, and days of prep work, required to shoot the Episode 1 scene in which the heavy-set Oz is tied up naked to a chair, Farrell’s makeup and hair routine was chiseled down to approximately two-and-half to three hours every morning for “The Penguin.” On “The Batman” movie, shot on-and-off during the COVID shutdown, Marino had to design three different sets of prosthetics because Farrell’s weight (like all of us) fluctuated during lockdown. On “The Penguin” it was one size fits all over the year of shooting, with all the facial prosthetics being disposable after a day’s use. The first hour of every morning would be dedicated to Farrell’s hair.

“(Colin) has got a mega head of hair, so we really paste it down with this industrial type of hairspray, we’re like pasting it totally, and then we’re using clear medical tape called Opsite, which we take and stretch [to] make his hair even flatter,” said Marino. “Then a bald cap goes on, then another prosthetic goes over that, so to begin with, it’s just this partially bald person to start, and that takes an hour.”

Marino’s team also had four to five body suits for Farrell, all identical, but the actor would sweat through each, requiring a rotation that allowed for cleaning and drying. In terms of weight, the suit wasn’t terribly lighter than what Farrell wore when naked in Episode 1, the key difference just being the detail work required of the skin.

From Farrell’s perspective, Marino’s hair and makeup trailer became an oasis. Beyond Marino’s incredible artistry, the prosthetic designer’s reputation of creating an environment for actor’s to relax is one of the reasons he’s quickly become a favorite collaborator of Hollywood stars.

“I enjoyed the three hours every morning. I did. It was like a discotheque in the makeup trailer sometimes, we played music from every era, and we had pizza parties, and we had doughnuts,” said Farrell. “I got to take that three hours to get my head in the game, for the day’s work that was upcoming, We’d have chats, and then we wouldn’t talk for an hour, and then we’d have a chat for 20 minutes. It was all super organic.”

Farrell described the trailer as a “sacred place,” in which no one but Marino’s team was allowed to come in, which was mentally important for the actor, who liked maintaining the illusion of his character by only allowing the other filmmakers and actors to see the finished product.

“I lost track of who I was, [rather] than it felt more artificial. The feeling of being submerged beneath all this stuff was so significant,” said Farrell. “It was so present in my body and thereby in my psychology, as well that to speak like this [Farrell gestures to his mouth, referring to his normal everyday Irish brough] felt more artificial than to just continue with the behavior, and the kind of way of walking, and the stuff that I had committed to [to play the character].”