Colin Farrell unpacks ‘The Penguin’s’ shocking finale: ‘It was really, really ugly’

No one was safe in the final episode of “The Penguin.” And shooting its most harrowing scene had star Colin Farrell all cut up.

Our interview over, it was Colin Farrell’s turn to ask questions. Standing up, he ushered me to one side of a crowded junket room. Farrell wanted my take on “The Penguin’s” finale. “I know it was dark,” he said, a hint of concern on those famous eyebrows. “But was it too dark?” We were speaking in September, after the first episode had aired, when few people had seen, or foreseen, just how pitch-black HBO’s “The Batman” spin-off would become (HBO, like CNN, is a part of Warner Bros. Discovery). Sure, life was cheap, Arkham Asylum was miserable and Gotham’s institutions were corrupt. So far, so normal for a story set in the Batman universe. But the series tracking Oz Cobb’s rise from the gutter to crime kingpin dived headfirst into the darkness in its home stretch. Audiences saw fratricide, attempted infanticide, and a kink involving Oz’s mother (somehow worse than it sounds). Then there was the murder of Oz’s right-hand man Victor Aguilar, which offered episode eight its most gut-wrenching scene. Many months after filming it, Farrell still appears cut up. That day on set, he recalled, was the toughest of a long shoot interrupted by the SAG strike. “Honest to God… I know it’s only acting, and geez, I’ve been doing it long enough. You go home and take your costume off and you go back to your life. But some scenes go in deeper than others,” he recalled. To recap, Victor, played by Rhenzy Feliz, became tangled in Oz’s world when he was caught trying to steal Oz’s Maserati back in episode one. The naïve teenager, orphaned by the events of “The Batman,” was taken under Oz’s wing and pushed into increasingly high-stakes tasks by his new boss, proving his loyalty. Theirs was one of few relationships in “The Penguin” that didn’t flip from allegiance to betrayal every half an episode. But once Oz had bested the Falcones and Maronis to become Gotham’s top dog, Victor became a dangling thread, linking Oz back to his former life and his beloved mother. Victor had to go. And in the very moment of their victory, Oz strangled him on a park bench overlooking the city, leaving his body in the dirt and making the death look like a mugging.