If you’ve been keeping up with HBO‘s The Penguin, you’ll already know that a massive part of leading man Colin Farrell‘s performance is aided by prosthetics. The work of Oscar-nominated makeup artist Mike Marino transforms the traditionally handsome, incredibly fit Irish movie star into the limping mobster we know as Oz Cobb. Marino worked closely with Farrell first on Matt Reeves‘s 2022 film The Batman and went deeper on the project for HBO’s The Penguin. Here, Oswald Cobb isn’t a side character, but the main event…and so the makeup technically has to possess even more subtlety.
So what comes next for Colin Farrell’s version of the Penguin and Mike Marino’s artistry within the world of The Batman? It’s common knowledge now that the Penguin will return to pester Robert Pattinson’s version of Batman in The Batman Part 2, but it’s not clear what other comic book villains might make the leap to that gritty, grounded version of Gotham City.
While the end of The Batman teased a version of the Joker played by Barry Keoghan, rumors have swelled that Reeves and company might try to incorporate the likes of beloved Batman: The Animated Series villain Clayface into The Batman sequel. Naturally, Decider had to ask Mike Marino which villains he’d most like to reinterpret for the screen when we interviewed him and Colin Farrell last month.
“Tell the world, Mike! Tell the world!” Farrell teased, looking right at Marino.
“Yeah, Clayface would be one,” Marino admitted. “Especially the very first iteration of Clayface would be amazing because, you know, he’s putting pieces of other people on his face. So I think it’d be really cool.”
“It’s dark,” Farrell said. “And keeping tonally [with Reeves’s universe].”
“I mean, I think also Two-Face is a great character,” Marino said. “Even though we’ve seen it before, I think I could maybe do something different. There’s just so many possibilities.”
“Ooo…I just got a tingle, as a fan of you,” Farrell said.
“I would love him,” Marino said, pointing to Farrell, “with someone else in the scene, you know. It could be cool.”
“But let’s see. We’ll see. There might be something in store. You know, we don’t know yet. It’s a secret,” Marino said.
Because The Penguin‘s executive producers Matt Reeves and Dylan Clark are putting finishing touches on their plans for the upcoming sequel to The Batman, it’s not only still a secret which villains will appear in the film — apart from the already confirmed Penguin — but also neither Marino nor Farrell know how much time will have passed between the end of the HBO series and the start of the second The Batman movie. Which means Marino and Farrell still have no idea how much the Penguin’s prosthetics might change from the show to the film.
“It depends on the timeline,” Farrell said. “If [Part 2] picks up a week after the show finishes, I wouldn’t say there’d be too many changes. But if there’s an elongation of the timeline — I know we were chatting the other night — there are just a couple of little things, subtle things that we could do.”
“Well, you know, a human face is always changing, even if it’s a week,” Marino said. “So the opportunity to change it in the future, yes, it’s a possibility.”
“I mean, from the beginning of the [first] film till now, I mean, there are some minor changes technically, but I don’t think anything so substantial that is so different…but technically, I think, you know, we’re always on a quest to improve, you know?”
The post ‘The Penguin’s Makeup Maestro Mike Marino Teases Which Batman Villains He Wants to Conjure Up Next: “Clayface Would Be One” appeared first on Decider.
