While the Penguin has been a long-standing supervillain in the Batman comics since 1941, Oswald Cobb was creatively birthed in a simpler time when we didn’t care so much about villain origin stories. HBO‘s limited The Penguin series sets to change all of that, including providing the reason for what happened to his foot that causes his limp.
In episode one, we see the reason for Oz’s waddle, so to speak, as he arrives home and removes his shoes (and let’s point out that he most certainly does not appreciate the nickname, Penguin). “I had sculpted like 20 minutes before [Colin] came—a foot that I thought was crazy,” Mike Marino, prosthetic designer, told The Wrap. “He sat in the chair and I was working in the corner and I showed him and I was like, ‘What do you think of this thing?’”
Farrell was a fan instantly. “It’s so lo-fi and yet so highly brilliant. It’s real hands-on art the way artisans envision it,” he said. “Not to deny the advent of technology and the benefits of it as well in all sorts of realms of experience—but the hands-on makeup that this guy designs and applies, what Dick Smith did, what Rick Baker did, all these geniuses. I just hope that all filmmakers choose to use practical, in-camera stuff.”
As showrunner Lauren LeFranc explained to IGN it was important to show why he limps—due to having clubfoot, a congenital foot deformity—in the first episode of The Penguin to, rather poetically, “firmly establish why and to show the level of pain that he puts himself through, but doesn’t speak about it.”
She continued, “This is nothing that we’ve ever put on camera but in my mind, because if you have a clubfoot, now there’s a surgery you can get, and that often people do. And so, for my reasoning as to why he doesn’t, he grew up with very little money. He didn’t come from anything, and his mother didn’t decide to spend the money on a surgery like that,” she said. (According to Mount Sinai, clubfoot is rather simply corrected through lengthening or shortening the Achilles tendon.)
“Also, because she doesn’t see it as a disability. She doesn’t see it as a problem. She sees it as a way for him to strengthen himself. Something I was conscious of are the sort of comic book tropes that have come before, of those who are other, those who have disabilities, those who have scars on their face. They’re often easily depicted as the villain, and I think it’s just an unfortunate thing in our comic book history, and I wanted to try to disrupt that as much as possible.”
“So for me, it was important to show that Oz, psychologically, is a damaged person. Who he is inside is what informs the choices and the darker choices he makes. It’s not because he has a disability. It’s not based on the way that he looks. Of course, that’s an aspect of his character, but that’s not solely and predominantly why. So that was something that was always very important to me.”
The Penguin premieres on MAX on Thursday, September 19, and then airs episodically each Sunday from September 29.