I watched The Penguin because of the serious buzz I heard about it on social media. I'm usually into eclectic, old TV shows or old films, but a friend asked me if I’d seen it and told me, It's so good. I have HBO, so I just watched the first episode and it pulled me in immediately. I ended up bingeing it and knocked it out in two days. I've been doing a press tour for Unstoppable, so I don't really have a lot of time. But when I do have the time, I go all in.
I'm not a huge comic book fan, so I didn’t watch The Penguin to understand who the character was or immerse myself in his origin story. But I love mob stories and crime stories — Breaking Bad, Sopranos, The Wire — and it went down that route in a very authentic way. It didn't feel like I was watching a comic book story about a villain or a super villain, it just felt to me, as a New Yorker, like a New York crime story.
On top of that, there were the performances. I love Colin Farrell; he's always able to stretch himself and do something different, whether it's with his voice or his physicality. And his performance here is top tier. I know Colin has already brought the character to the world in The Batman, but this was my first time seeing him in the role, and I was just blown away by it.
There's also a Dominican character in it, Victor, played by Rhenzy Feliz. I'm Dominican, and so I'm always very proud and happy to see someone like me on the screen. And he was a huge part of the show. At the start, it seemed like Victor might be a minor character, but then he just went and carried the whole thing. I want to reach out to Rhenzy to congratulate him for his performance. I remember watching him and thinking, Damn, that's such a meaty role. I love that – it gave me an edge and inspired me. That's a moment where I think, Oh, yeah, I would love to do something like that.
The Penguin also just made the New York City look so authentic and real. There's a shot of a neighborhood getting flooded and Victor's family is on a rooftop, and you can see the fire escape, you can see the corner store, you can see everything that feels like my childhood. It was so exciting for me to watch that, it was so cool to see my world, as I don't often see my neighborhood, my environment, my people on the screen.
Whenever I watch something, I just dissect and dissect and dissect and I study. To me, I know I really love a film or a show when I stop analyzing it and just fall into the story. And that's what happened with The Penguin. But I was also thinking about Colin Farrell’s prosthetic and wondering how much that informed his character and the performance.
I did a scene in When They See Us where my character got really badly beaten, and the makeup department put all these prosthetics on me, including a ball in my mouth that made me feel like I had a big bump. That definitely informed my performance and made me feel like I was really hurt, so I wondered about when Colin Farrell put on that prosthetic (and had three or four hours of makeup), did he just fall into the character? Did the prosthetic make it easier? I don't think he leaned on the prosthetic at all, though, and I think that's what makes his performance special. Like Tom Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, there’s a different voice and a mask covering the face, but the performance is still there, and you still feel the character and all the emotions. I think it's an even harder thing to do to have a full facial prosthetic and still put your heart behind it.
Having facial prosthetics is definitely not something we dream of as actors. For me on When They See Us, I had a face graft, so I had to sit with my face in a mold for an hour, which is how they made all the different cuts and bruises on my face. When they actually applied the prosthetic, it took about two and a half hours. But that time allowed me to get into character, and once the prosthetic was on me, I felt transformed. It's almost like I’d put on a different set of clothes. I felt like a man in a suit, and there was a certain confidence that came with that. When you put on the prosthetic, I think it gets you inside the character quicker.
