Mike Marino, the makeup designer responsible for transforming Colin Farrell into Oswald “Oz” Cobb for “The Batman” in 2022, knew that returning to work on the actor’s look for the HBO spinoff series “The Penguin” would be harder than the film in every way. In the film, Farrell was a supporting character who only appeared in a handful of scenes. With the show, he’s front and center in almost every shot, and in some, there is even full-body nudity. Add in TV vs. film budgets, different kinds of lighting and longer shooting days, and Marino was in for a real challenge.
“It was harder on every level,” Marino said. “We always try to build things to look great in person. My mentality is if you get it to look good in person, it’ll look good on film. But now we’re in different lighting environments (with) less control. We have extreme close-ups of a makeup. It’s much more difficult.”
The biggest hurdle for Marino and the show was hair. For the film, Farrell shaved the top of his head, which made the difficult process of applying Oz’s thinning hair a bit easier. When it came to starting production on the show, Farrell informed Marino he didn’t want to shave his head again. This meant the makeup designer had to contend with the actor’s thick hair.
“Colin has a huge head of hair that doesn’t want to stay down,” Marino said. “That’s why he’s always wearing a headband in interviews and stuff—hair’s wanting to stick up. So flattening that every day and making it look like he’s bald is the biggest challenge. And then the lighting and the coloration and all of those things play. There’s a million puzzle pieces and factors that will make or break this.”
The early development for Oz came from Marino’s conversations with “The Batman” director Matt Reeves. The two talked a lot about “The Godfather” and likened the character of the Penguin to Fredo Corleone, the sweaty, balding brother of Al Pacino’s Michael in Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic film. Marino also went straight to the source to draw further inspiration. During the interview with TheWrap, he showed off walls and walls of comic book art through the years. There was “Batman,” obviously, but also “The Amazing Spider-Man,” “Judge Dredd” and more. There have been countless interpretations of the Penguin across media, so Marino took what was also there while keeping his own hyperrealistic approach.
“I have a vast knowledge of comic books and all the different artists that have all different types of interpretations of Penguin,” he said. “I knew him very well. I mean, not only from the 1966 TV show, not only Danny DeVito but (comic book artists) Neal Adams, Carmine Infantino, Brian Bolland—all these people who did their own versions of the Penguin.”
He added, “If you compare a real human being to the Penguin, it’s going to be very rare for you to find a person that looks like that. They exist, but it’s rare. Taking in hyperrealism and a fantasy feeling of scars and tuck marks and the general shape of him and my looking at penguins and angles of their eyebrows and all these things, I didn’t so much copy anything. I just let it intuitively come out in my studio.”
A version of this story first appeared in the Below-the-Line Issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
