Colin Farrell Loved Playing an Uggo in 'The Batman'

My god, they’ve done it again. They’ve made a gorgeous man ugly for a motion picture. Guess what this man did to achieve such an impossible physical transformation. No, no, he didn’t just drink melted ice cream to pack on the pounds. No, he didn’t just cut his real hair into a comb-over. No, he didn’t just put on a pair of glasses and adopt a kind of nebbish persona. You are not doing a good job at guessing.

Maybe I should tell you the man. It’s Colin Farrell, and they made him ugly to play the Penguin in The Batman. This is what he looks like in the film:

How did they do it? Fine, I’ll tell you. According to Farrell, all it takes is several hours in the makeup trailer and a can-do attitude.

“It took about six or eight hours. It was a team of 10 or 15 people. And it was really fun,” the In Bruges actor told Collider. It was so much fun that he even went to Starbucks to see if he could trick all of us regulars into thinking he was just some guy who looked kind of menacing. And guess what — it worked.

“I went into Starbucks and ordered myself a very un-Oswald drink, an oat-milk latte with two stevia sweeteners,” Farrell said. I guess the Penguin’s villain origin story is not lactose intolerance. “I got a couple of stares but only because it’s such an imposing look.” I’m sure Burbank Starbucks customers have seen worse.

Regardless, the look earned some stares. But did it spark his imagination and give him the license to inhabit a character? Yes.

Here’s what he said to Entertainment Tonight:

It just sparked my imagination and continued to every day that I went to work. I just felt like I had such license to inhabit a character in a way I had never been given.

And here’s what he told Extra:

It was so fun to inhabit. I had such permission to just explore and create and use my imagination.

I’m happy for Colin. It appears he is so oppressively hot that the only way for him to feel truly liberated is to occupy a fake normal man’s body that takes eight hours to apply on top of his own. This could explain why he looks so sad in his other upcoming film, After Yang. It’s not because his character is contemplating the ethics of artificial intelligence — it’s because, after getting a brief taste of the good life, he is back inside the prison of his perfectly symmetrical face.