“The Penguin” showrunner Lauren LeFranc wants to get one thing straight: Oswald “Oz” Cobb is a bad man.
Though he’s the face of HBO’s limited series about the criminal underworld of Gotham City, LeFranc insists that this new iteration of iconic DC Comics villain the Penguin (Colin Farrell) isn’t someone to admire. When he debuted in Matt Reeves’ 2022 film “The Batman,” Oz served as both a red herring and comic relief, as LeFranc describes it. But on the spinoff, she was determined to leave no doubt about the true nature of the man behind the limp.
“I wanted him to be a villain through and through,” she says. “It’s worth examining a man like Oz to see the psychology behind him, then hold up a mirror to the audience, like: We like this guy; there’s something engaging about him. But that doesn’t mean what he does is OK. And to do that properly, I didn’t ever want to fall into the trap of making excuses for him or condoning his behavior.”
“The Penguin” is LeFranc’s darkest project yet. She first broke through as a writer on the 2007 NBC spy comedy “Chuck,” then tapped into her childhood love of comics on ABC’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” which was set in the Marvel universe.
“Being a part of that so early on was really interesting because everyone was trying to figure out what a Marvel TV show would be,” she says. “Once we learned we could connect to the films, it really opened up our ability to tell different types of stories.”
Those lessons prepared her for “The Penguin.” Though Reeves was still editing “The Batman” when LeFranc signed on, she was able to get a sense of the universe through reading the script and talking with the filmmaker.
“To me, the appeal was that there were no superheroes in the world, so I would be able to put my own stamp on it,” she says. “If I was to take on a character like the Joker, that would be less enticing because everybody has seen fantastic interpretations of the Joker. The Penguin I grew up with was Danny DeVito’s Penguin [in “Batman Returns”], who I loved but who obviously had an extremely different tone.”
For inspiration, LeFranc returned to the Penguin comics of her youth and studied mob books and documentaries. She even read Shakespeare, seeing “The Penguin” as its own kind of tragedy. But she also had her eye on creating something she’d never seen before.
“I was aching for a female character that had some more backstory and depth,” she explains. “For so long, writers weren’t thinking about women characters in this deeper way. In the crime genre, most women are murdered or they’re a girlfriend, and it just felt like there was so much opportunity.”
This led her to Sofia Falcone, a lesser-known DC character who’s the daughter of Gotham crime boss Carmine Falcone. LeFranc’s version of Sofia, played by Cristin Milioti, is fresh out of Arkham Asylum and much more dangerous than she was before she went in.
“I wanted her to be flawed and imperfect and very violent,” the writer says. “She’s not a hero, but she’s very real.”
Thankfully, Milioti and Farrell were on board with LeFranc’s mission to go all-in on this vicious pair.
“Within every scene, Colin and I were constantly talking about: ‘How dark do we go here?’ ” she recalls. As an example, she cites Oz’s murder of two characters on Episode 5. “It was a specific choice to say: We’re lingering and holding on Oz watching them, and we’re hearing their screams. And that was something that Colin was like, ‘We have to do that because this is so terrible, what he does.’ And I’m like, ‘Yes!’ ”
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
This story originally appeared in the Feb. 6 issue of Backstage Magazine.
Lauren LeFranc headshot Credit: Gray Hamner