Sorry, Patriots fans, but the big news this week isn’t FX’s American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez. It’s The Penguin, on HBO and streaming on Max.
This is such big news because even if you’re not the least bit interested in supervillains and comic book lore, you’re probably already familiar with The Penguin, thanks to all the rumors about Colin Farrell’s transformation in the title role. No, he doesn’t look like a penguin. He looks even less like Colin Farrell. He looks like someone named Oswald Cobb (the Penguin’s first name): bald, overweight, the goofball that time forgot. Farrell is practically unrecognizable. That’s the kind of actor that disappears into a role.
There have been a number of extreme transformations in the movies. Just think of Robert De Niro putting on all those pounds in Raging Bull (and winning an Oscar for it), or Jessica Chastain’s cosmetic makeover in The Eyes of Tammy Faye (also winning an Oscar).
Such sweeping transformations are rarer on television. Perhaps that’s because, as difficult as they are to sustain over the two-hour running time of a movie, they’re even harder to sustain over the course of multiple episodes—or entire seasons.
Rarer and harder doesn’t mean it’s unknown. Before Farrell’s Penguin, there was Ethan Hawke’s John Brown in The Good Lord Bird. Before Hawke, there was Bryan Cranston’s Walter White in Breaking Bad. Before Cranston, there was René Auberjonois’ Odo in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
In comedy, transformation and unrecognizability can be a license to kill (in the way stand-up comedians mean “kill,” not in the 007 sense). During her Saturday Night Live tenure, Kate McKinnon had a number of such characters. Her version of U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was in a class of its own. The ultimate transformation/unrecognizability situation would be McKinnon’s Sessions, interviewed by Martin Short’s Jiminy Glick, with a surprise visit from Farrell’s Penguin to top it all off.
Mark Feeney can be reached at [email protected].
