Colin Farrell has been able to transform his body and mind for The Penguin to the point where he was virtually unrecognizable. He first appeared in 2022’s The Batman, and now the Penguin has his own show set in the gritty underworld of Gotham. But something would be not quite right if the mobster had Farrell’s native Irish accent, which doesn’t sound quite as threatening.
But to get into character, Farrell worked with a vocal coach to perfect the Northeast accent. “My dialect coach, Jessica Drake, she has a library of thousands of accents from all over the world dating back to the ’30s and ’40s, so when we’re preparing for something we go in — based on where the character’s from, we have a listen to four or five different recordings from around that region, then you narrow the zone into something you think is good energetically, not just the sounds,” the actor The Hollywood Reporter.
Farrell kept coming back to one term that would help, and it’s pretty unconventional. “There was a gentleman who was the manager of an apartment complex in the ’80s; he was older, he sounded about 60 or so, and he talked a lot about Gefilte fish. And so whenever my accent started to go, she would call me back and I’d say ‘Gefilte fish’ and that was a little trick,” he explained. Not only is it a popular Passover dish, but the phrase also helped Farrell stay in character.
In addition to changing his accent for the upcoming DC drama, Farrell had to wear an excessive amount of prosthetics in order to achieve the Oz Cobb look. This is something he won’t miss. “I never want to put that f*cking suit and that f*cking head on again,” the actor told Total Film last week. Hopefully he learned to shed his Penguin accent or else we’ll have another Austin Butler on our hands.
The Penguin premieres Thursday, September 19th at 9 pm ET on HBO, then Sundays starting on September 29th.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)