Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for The Penguin Episode 2.
The Penguin is only two episodes in as of this week, and it’s already off to an explosive start — but should we have expected any less from Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) as he aims to climb his way to the top of the ruthless Falcone mob family? Toppling one of Gotham’s most powerful criminal empires isn’t the kind of thing that happens overnight, though, and in this week’s episode, “Inside Man,” directed by Craig Zobel and written by Erika L. Johnson, Oz is forced to get creative when his original plan to work with the Falcones’ number one enemy goes sideways. Meanwhile, the fresh-out-of-Arkham Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) is convinced there’s a rat on the inside — and takes drastic steps to ensure whoever’s plotting against them will be flushed out.
Ahead of the premiere of Episode 2, Collider had the opportunity to sit down with Zobel, who helmed the first three episodes of The Penguin, for another wide-ranging discussion about some of the biggest moments of “Inside Man.” Over the course of the interview, which you can read below, Zobel explains why Sofia’s Arkham scene might look familiar to fans of Matt Reeves‘ The Batman, which surprising on-screen choice can be credited to Farrell alone, and the tight filming window they had for the hijacking scene. He also discusses why Sofia is finally embracing her inner monster, moments when it was important to find more humor for Oz, what the last scene means for Victor (Rhenzy Feliz) especially, and more. (Stay tuned for our chat with Zobel about Episode 3 — and if you missed our conversation about Episode 1, you can read it here.)
Craig Zobel Explains Why Sofia’s Arkham Scene Looks So Familiar
COLLIDER: The episode starts with what seems like it could be a flashback at first, with Sofia in Arkham, but then obviously we see that it’s the result of this… is hypnosis a good way to describe it?
CRAIG ZOBEL: It’s actually EMVR. It’s kind of a… don’t know how new, but it’s a newer therapy, trauma therapy, that is much more sensory-based than experiential.
A scene like that, there’s a surrealness to it. You think at first that Sofia’s remembering something that happened in Arkham, with Al coming to visit her, but then we see that his hand is missing that finger, and the red light over the door mimicks the light in the doctor’s office. How do you approach filming a scene like that in comparison to something that’s more rooted in reality?
ZOBEL: Well, it’s also the first time you see Arkham in the show, and it’s also one of the first times that you see, okay, we’re going to learn a lot more about Sofia — not just as an antagonist to Oz, but on her own. She’s going to be a character where we follow her arc as well. The hope is that you are intentionally behind it at first and not knowing it’s a dream, until you see his hand. Kalina [Ivanov], our production designer, was amazing. That [room] is modeled exactly the same as where Batman and the Riddler interview in the movie. We tried to match that as much as we could.
When Sofia comes out of the state that she’s been under, we see those scratches on her throat, which we hadn’t seen up until this point, but we don’t understand the significance of them until later in the episode, where she wakes up from a nightmare. We not only find out that it’s from her scratching at her own throat, but then also, where she’s sleeping is in the closet of her room.
ZOBEL: Right. Which is the bedroom that probably hasn’t been touched since she went into Arkham eight years ago. The thought there was just that she had gotten used to sleeping in a certain way and that the bedroom felt so foreign to her that she kind of couldn’t be in there.
Whose idea was it to have Oz just drinking directly out of the Pepto-Bismol bottle?
ZOBEL: Colin. That was Colin, actually. He texted us that morning, and I was like, “Yeah, that’s great. Go get Pepto-Bismol,” because that was such a clever… Sure, this is that guy.
‘The Penguin’ Only Had Two Nights To Shoot Episode 2’s Big Hijacking Scene
Considering what Oz is about to walk into, which is all the Maronis there in prison, and having the meeting where he then proceeds to pitch them on his plan for them to hijack the delivery trucks that are transporting the drops shipment. It’s also a pretty big action sequence in this episode, and I wanted to ask about the preparation that goes into something like that — especially because you’re not only filming what’s happening on the street with the vehicles, but also Oz is shooting at people inside the truck.
ZOBEL: It was a more ambitious element, for sure. We were aware that we hadn’t had something quite like that in the first episode. There is a bit of a small chase, where [Oz] hides in the trunk, and then he gets into that fight where the guy gets pushed into the school bus. But we wanted to have something that felt a little bigger and a little more reflective of the character he is in the movie. So, that took a while. We found a place under this bridge and that was quite cool. I knew that, at night, it would look neat because it had architecture that you could see.
It was one of those spaces in a town where there was just nothing there. It wasn’t like it was dodgy or scary. It was just sort of the place that you don’t notice while you’re driving by, and we created a bit of a texture for it and made it a unique space. There was lots of buying matchbox cars and moving them around and saying, “This will be how this happens. This car will drive in this way. This car will drive in that way.” We really only had two nights to do it, and because they were nights, they weren’t very long. We didn’t have nighttime for as long as you sometimes might. It was a pretty hectic shoot in a way, just in terms of really nailing down how to do it a good bit ahead of time so that we could pull off the amount of stuntwork— and then the amount of, like you said, dialogue and drama too.
In terms of Oz in the truck, how much of that is Colin just having to throw himself around?
ZOBEL: We felt like it would be too dangerous to just be straight-up driving the truck during some of that stuff, but we had the most old-school solution in the world, which was we had the grip department and the special effects department put big long two-by-fours under the truck and just shake it up with that. Sometimes, the oldest ways work.
Obviously, what happens during the hijack is not what’s supposed to happen, but in typical Oz fashion, he gets away about as cleanly as he could, with no one really knowing the role that he has played in trying to orchestrate this, and failing, except the Maronis. Later, he and Sofia are walking down the hall after the meeting of the family and there’s that moment where he’s like, “What are we, in a race?”
ZOBEL: That’s my favorite line in that episode. [Laughs]
How often did you try to get that done in one take — the two of them walking down the hall, having that conversation before they stop at the end and have that moment before she heads upstairs?
ZOBEL: I can’t tell you how many takes we did, but it wasn’t very many. We got there pretty fast. There are times where I just love… Oz is funny to me. That is definitely one of those times.
The church in this episode is such a striking place to film in. Where was that location in terms of where you shot the scenes between Oz and Sofia after the funeral?
ZOBEL: It’s a church in Harlem, and it’s quite an old church. It’s funny, the interesting thing about that scene is, as written, is it sort of happened on the street. When we were walking through the church, we found this atrium, and we were able to redesign the scene to work around where she could be watching — and all of that sort of fell into place, and it was just an awesome opportunity afforded by a very cool location.
I will also say in terms of just looking for places for humor with Oz, when he runs across the street, that had happened to me about two weeks before we shot it, where I was trying to be polite and let a car go, and they were trying to be polite and let me go, and I was just like, “This is a very Oz kind of situation.” Most people might not even notice it in the show, but it was still important to me to be doing that kind of stuff because I felt like he was the kind of guy who would get frustrated at the car, and be like, “I tried. I gave you a chance to go and now, ugh, you’re not listening to me.” We were always just looking for any little tiny thing like that that we could do.
‘The Penguin’s Craig Zobel Explains Why Sofia Is Embracing the Monster Within
A moment that starts as something with more levity and shifts is when Sofia’s cousin finds her at the wake, at the house, and they’re having sort of a pleasant conversation. Then Gia, the daughter, comes over, and you see the fear that really exists. What’s been really interesting to watch too, and I feel like this is how Cristin has been playing it, especially in this episode, is that Sofia just leans into it. I’m wondering about how you wanted to frame that scene because we see that look in her eye, the moment when it flips in her head, and she thinks, “Oh, you’re afraid of me? Okay, let me embrace that.”
ZOBEL: Yeah, and she keeps doing that through the course of, at least, these first two episodes. She’s a person where stories have been told about her in the first episode. She knows that she has this reputation that she feels like she doesn’t deserve, and what we’re seeing is her realizing that she won’t ever shake it, or doesn’t believe she could ever shake it. People’s minds are made up. They’ve made a decision about her, and I think that the first three episodes really are her coming to terms with that. If no one’s going to believe that she isn’t a monster, she might as well at least get the privileges of being a monster.
At the end, when Oz is making Victor dig the grave, it’s not the first time, and it’s definitely not the last, where it feels like Oz is saying things that he’s probably told himself thousands upon thousands of times as much as he is trying to teach Victor a lesson.
ZOBEL: That scene is an interesting scene in the fact that Oz is, in some ways, talking to himself in a real way. We also get to see that he is essentially a pretty self-oriented human, and he is not necessarily… when stressed, he cares about himself, and doesn’t give thought to how traumatic that is for Victor. He just wants to kick a dog because he got yelled at. Essentially, he’s behaving badly. But it’s also, I hope, interesting for Victor in this episode, in that he’s stuck around. He’s here, and he’s participating in this mob life now, and he’s starting to realize what that is going to be. I think that scene is the beginning of a question. There’s constant danger for him, and is it a good idea for him to be in this world? That’s a question that he will hopefully carry forward, and we’ll learn more in the next episode what that means to him.
The Penguin is currently available to stream on Max.
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