Despite its comic-book origins, The Penguin started off as a straightforward gangland drama, like Boardwalk Empire with Batman waiting in the wings. But the series, which picks up with waddling wannabe Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) where 2022's The Batman left off, turned out to be full of twists and turns, both in terms of its plot and the kind of show we thought we were watching. Mobster's daughter Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), who in the comics is revealed as a serial killer known as the Hangman, was released from Arkham Asylum as a dangerous psychopath, only for us to discover that she's been unjustly imprisoned for a string of murders committed by her own father. Oz was a striver, a classic example of a low-level goon trying to engineer his rise to the top, but also a genuine danger, who in the season finale unexpectedly strangled his young second-in-command, Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz), because he worried that their attachment might make him vulnerable. The season, which ends by setting the stage for the 2026 sequel to The Batman, elevates Oz from a bumbling thug to a genuine threat, but Victor's death isn't larger than life: It's small and ugly, and the more shocking because of it.
Slate talked to Lauren LeFranc, The Penguin's creator and showrunner, about that shocking death, writing muscular men and complicated women, and how John F. Kennedy's sister changed Sofia Falcone. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Sam Adams: So, now that the finale has aired, I can finally ask you: Why?
Lauren LeFranc: I know. I know.
Oz's murder of Victor is genuinely shocking, even for all the terrible things we've seen Oz do over the course of the season. Did you go in knowing that was how this story had to end?
I mean, I'm devastated by it too, but it felt like it was the thing that had to be done. From the very beginning, when I first came up with every character's emotional arcs, my early pitches to [The Batman director] Matt [Reeves] always involved, one, this kid Victor, who would become the heart of the series in many ways, and two, that Oz essentially rips his heart out by the end to become the monster that he feels he needs to be in order to succeed.
The Penguin is a genre show about an underworld crime war, so a lot of people get killed, to very different effect. When Oz shoots the corrupt cop Marcus Wise in the head and his brains splatter over the lens, it's funny. When Sofia shoots her father's deputy, Johnny Vitti, it's kind of badass. But Victor's death is ugly, and you don't give it that Godfather Part II sense of tragic inevitability -- that this is something Oz has to do because of who he is. You don't give him that slack.
It was really important to me that you feel as if Oz doesn't need to do this, and yet he does. Not that anybody needs to enact violence in our show at any time -- they just all choose to for various reasons. It's easy to justify Oz's actions throughout the show, and Sofia's and so many of our characters'. But it was really important for me that we do not justify what Oz does to Victor, and that it feels appalling and terrible and unnecessary.
I talked a lot with our writers room about where you place it. Because I knew Victor needed to die, and as we were breaking the story for the finale, it felt very essential to put it later in the episode, not earlier. I want you as an audience to be surprised, and also thrown and disgusted with what Oz chooses to do. I worried if you did this to Victor sooner, it would be hard for you to even follow Oz or to understand what he's going through, or for the Oz-vs.-Sofia quality of the finale to carry the same weight.
Oz has already won, in a sense. His enemies are dead or imprisoned, he controls Gotham's underworld, and he's corrupted its government. There's just no need for it.
In the first episode, when Victor and Oz are sitting side by side outside sharing a suicide slushie, it's this moment where these two scrappy guys come together after a hellacious night, and I wanted to mirror that, so that it feels as if you can take a breath, that Victor made it. Victor's just come from seeing Oz at his most vulnerable with his mother in the hospital. And Victor tells Oz that he feels like he's family to him.
I've watched the scene several times, and you really don't see it coming, except for the turn when Victor tells Oz he's like family, and Oz kind of grimaces, because he realizes that's precisely the wrong thing to say. Family doesn't work out well in this world.
Oz almost lost the sort of, quote, unquote, "game" to Sofia because he loves his mother, and he can't let that happen again, in his mind. The tragedy of it is how terrible it is that to Oz, that's the wrong word.
You end the season with a little bit of setup for The Batman: Part II: Sofia gets a letter in Arkham from Selina Kyle, and we see the Bat-signal in the clouds. What sort of brief did you get from Matt Reeves about where you need to leave the characters? Did you have to, for example, keep Sofia on the board?
I didn't have any mandates for any of the characters except that Oz needed to achieve a level of power that made him more noticeable to the Batman. I knew I didn't want to kill Sofia, because I really love what I was able to do with her, and she's become a really important character to me, and I hope for many other people. In a comic-book show, it felt more tragic that she ended up back in Arkham, and like a more terrible punishment for Oz to give her. But I would always ask Matt, "Can I put Sofia back in Arkham?" When I killed Salvatore Maroni in the way that I did, that was a big ask in my mind, because Salvatore is a big character in the comics. So I would always say, "Here's why I want this character to end this way." And we would talk about it if there was an issue, but he was really supportive of my creative vision for the show, and it was a really nice collaboration.
You have another full-circle moment where Oz is once again driving with Sofia in the back seat, but instead of being her chauffeur, he's now the one in control. And he remarks how they're alike, raised by damaged single parents, outcasts in their own families. But because she comes from privilege and he doesn't, that's an insurmountable barrier for him. No matter how rich or powerful he gets, he'll always be aggrieved.
Oz has a rationale for every decision he makes, and in Oz's mind, it's true that he sees Sofia as privileged, and Oz is, as Sofia sarcastically says to him, a "man of the people." But this is how Oz needs to see himself to justify every action he takes. As an audience, we've had the experience of understanding Sofia's plight in Arkham and what her family did, so we know that it's not that simple. Of course she was born into privilege, but she has been at a major disadvantage for most of her life and has been striving for similar things as Oz has.
Oz has always wanted this one specific thing, and all he can see is that she had it and he didn't.
Right. Yeah. And he has to rationalize to himself what he does. He really is a narcissist, and he constructs his own view of the world to his benefit, always.
Your job was to lay out an origin story for the Penguin, but the show is really two origin stories: Oz Cobb's and Sofia -- do I say Falcone or Gigante?
You better say Gigante or you're in trouble.
Sofia Gigante, then. She is someone who is really made into who she is: an innocent person confined to an asylum for 10 years, essentially driven mad. But when we see Oz as a kid, he's already who he's going to be, a child who will allow his two brothers to die so he can have more of his mother's attention. His mother might not be quite right in the finale when she calls him "the devil," but she's not all wrong.
I think you could argue there's many other ways for Sofia to move forward in her life. The path she chooses coming out of Arkham is very self-destructive. It's empowering in some ways too, but by the end, she comes to this realization that she's still playing, as she says in Episode 7, by her father's rules. It's this game. And it's a game that Oz knows very, very well too. She's still trying to prove to her father that she has value. Why is she spending her time doing that? Is this something she even wants? Certainly she wants power, but does she need or want power on this level, and does this give her strength? It isn't quite healing for her.
Cristin Miloti plays the moment when she realizes what Oz has done so well. You have a moment of relief when you realize he hasn't killed her, but when the cops show up to take her back to Arkham, the look on her face is so clearly "Anything but this."
It's gut-wrenching. That's the hope, really, even though that sounds terrible to say. I really have always viewed this show as a tragedy in a way, one that I hope is engaging and enthralling and funny in moments. But at the end of the day, we're trying to have it feel a bit operatic.
Can you talk about what you wanted to achieve with Sofia more broadly? In the comics, she's a serial killer called the Hangman, and on The Penguin, people think she is, but she's actually been framed by the real killer, who is her father. So if people just know the comics, or even if they skimmed the Wiki, they're going to be surprised by how you turn that inside-out.
Carmine Falcone's death in the film led to a power vacuum in our show, and that was the main thing that I knew: Oz was taking advantage of a power vacuum. So when it came to thinking about adversaries for Oz, I thought Sofia would be a really interesting person to bring into the fold. I wanted this interesting brother-sister relationship at its center, and I wanted a really interesting, complex, flawed female character. I mean, I wanted many of them. There's some tropes in comic books and crime dramas, and they don't always serve female characters as well as they might men. So I really wanted to try to subvert those tropes and just add more dimension in the way that I wished I had when I was a kid growing up, and that as a woman now, I would still love. I can't say I love Oz, because I really find him very difficult to write, especially towards the end. He's really an appalling character in a lot of ways. But he speaks so many truths that I personally connect to as well, and he's a really amazing character to get the opportunity to write. I don't think people like me are given a lot of opportunities like that, in terms of writing a muscular type of character.
When it came to Sofia and her story specifically, I was interested in Rosemary Kennedy. I thought it was so tragic what happened to her and how her father -- who obviously came from a very patriarchal household and a very wealthy family -- had the power to put her away. She was 23, and she was given a lobotomy, and her story's never told. So I wanted to see if I could tell a Rosemary Kennedy-esque story, and also flip on its head the comic-book tradition of how everyone who comes from Arkham is a psychopath. It felt exciting and fun to me to lead the audience down a path of all these preconceived notions of what we think of someone who comes from Arkham, but also how common it is to label women as insane. I mean, you can look at people like Britney Spears, for instance. Mental institutions used to do these terrible things to women, and women would be deemed hysterical and be thrown into an institution. That wasn't that long ago.
While we're talking about great actresses and complicated women: You got to create Oz's mom, Francis, played by Deirdre O'Connell, essentially from scratch. What went into that character for you?
What little of Oz I knew was based on the movie, because he's not in very many scenes. I got to read the script early, which was really helpful and informative, and I was thinking about, OK, if I'm going to take on this series about Oz, I need for my own self to understand where he comes from, who he comes from, why he is the way he is, what makes him tick, what he fears, what he wants, all that. In the comics, Oz's mother, in various forms, plays a prominent role, but I wanted to create my own version of who his mother would be, and so I created Francis. What I liked about her is that she is a ballsy woman, she is brash, and they have this strange connection. I always imagined that as a woman of her generation, she was overlooked herself. She was not given the opportunity or the respect that someone like her felt like she deserved. Circumstances didn't allow her to succeed and make a better life for herself in the way that she dreamed of. And yet, here's her son, who she believes can do that for her, and should do that for her.
In "Top Hat," the flashback episode, we see she was always brash. She always talked the way she does, but she loved her sons deeply, all three of them. And the revelation we come to in the finale where we realize that she always knew what Oz had done, and she's been sitting with that ... I mean, the two of them are quite terrible at closure. They don't talk about their feelings. If anything, this show could be an example of one of the many reasons people should explore therapy -- but not the therapy that Julian Rush does on Sofia, because that's also very bad.
On your Twitter account, you link to an article you wrote for the Rumpus about growing up with a girl who was killed by her mother, and being afraid that your own mother might hurt you. Did that play into creating a character like Francis, who we eventually find out came very close to having her own son killed?
Well, I do always try to bring my personal experience. The best thing you can do as a writer is try to live an interesting life and talk to other people who live interesting, very different lives than you. I definitely had an interesting one, and I am interested in trauma for a lot of reasons.
In so many ways, actually, I based Francis on my grandmother, my dad's mother, and she's a very different woman. She came from Mexico and immigrated to the United States, but was very prideful and very challenging as a mother to my dad. And yet she would never speak like Francis. I mean, Francis speaks the way she does because that's Oz's mom and I wanted you to know that Oz gets his mouth from a woman like her. My grandmother would be appalled if she knew that I would ever associate the two of them together, because she really viewed herself as quite classy.
In the last scene, Oz is dancing with Eve (Carmen Ejogo), who looks so much like his mother that it made me wonder if I'd been missing it the rest of the season.
That's very, very intentional. With Eve, we established that she becomes who her clients want her to be. The woman that we met early in the season was who Oz wanted her to be and what she looks like for Oz. When Sofia finds her in her apartment, this is who she actually is. She's not wearing a wig. She's not dressed up or dolled up. She looks really different. She has no makeup on.
It was always important to me, and this was always part of my initial pitch, that if Oz was to achieve a level of power -- and that is something that was not up for discussion, that was my job that I was tasked with for the season -- that he has to lose something emotionally.
It can't come without a cost. Some of the costs involve his own choosing, like Victor, and Francis, how she loses her mental capacities by the end and realizes her greatest fear. Oz does not give her the things he promises, one of which is to help her die and release her from the sort of mental prison that she's feared, because she, in his mind, betrayed him and didn't ever tell him she was proud of him -- and in fact, calls him the devil and wounds him. That's the last thing he gets from his mother, which is the antithesis of everything that he's wanted or demanded or felt like he deserved.
So it made a lot of sense that Eve, who is someone who he pays to do what he wants and to say what he wants, that he would have her dress up like his mother in a distorted way and tell him she's proud of him in the way that his mother never did, wearing the dress that we establish in the second episode, and we see again in seven and eight. That's something that Francis wore to the jazz club that night when, unbeknownst to Oz, she was considering having Rex kill him.
Which, up until Episode 8, he'd always thought was a great night.
In his mind, he was like, "Oh, what a special night. We celebrated my brothers, but they're gone now, and I get my mom all to myself." And Francis, we realize, is considering having someone who Oz looks up to as his mentor take him out. Our show's a tragedy, and I want it to be distorted and weird, but I also hope that we've laid the groundwork for you to see that Oz is a man who creates his own delusions. With Eve, it's to the extreme, but that is how he reconciles his own decisions, and that is how he gets what he wants, no matter if it's completely true or not.
The Penguin ends up not just establishing Oz as a formidable foe for the Batman, but as a genuinely horrifying person, not a comic-book villain. He's not someone who is going to carry out some elaborate plot against the people of Gotham so much as someone you would not want to be in the room with.
That was my goal and intention. I mean, it's the greatest gift in the world to have Colin Farrell be the lead in your show. He is a really exceptional actor and a very soulful actor, and he has great comedic timing. And he allowed himself to go to these very, very dark places, because Oz is a very dark character, at the end of the day. He's charming and he's fun as well, but he's dark. And the fact that he lives in his own delusion is a lot. I can never understand fully what it's like for Colin to literally inhabit this man. It's wild. And it's easy to forget that it's him. And I attribute that to Mike Marino, who did the prosthetics for Colin, but also Colin as an actor. You just stop remembering that it's Colin inside of Oz. You just think of Oz as this man.
I had to give up trying to find Colin Farrell underneath the prosthetics, because I just couldn't do it.
I think you stop looking, also, because you're just experiencing what he's doing. It's really tremendous. The appeal to me, in part, of taking on a show like this is that the Penguin is not the Joker, meaning he's not someone that you've seen many renditions of. I think to me, the most memorable is Danny DeVito's version. I loved Batman Returns, and I loved him in it. But it's very fantastical, it's very over the top, and it's just a different tone than what Matt established in his movie. It was exciting to me, the idea that we're going to meet Oz as a mobster, and to play him as just a man. There's nothing fantastical about him.
There's so many people like Oz in our world who hold a lot of power, who also connect with people because they speak, on some level, the truth. They can be charming and engaging, but also really terrifying and calculated, and not necessarily doing what they say that they will do or caring for people in the way that they say that they will. It felt so timely and so important to really engage with a guy like Oz and not turn away from him, but actually turn towards him so we can start to unpack, in our own society, what makes a man like Oz so appealing, and what makes him equally appalling? I don't know yet what people will think of Oz by the end of this, if people will make excuses for him or if they'll be turned off by him. I think it'll be a mixed bag, but I'm not sure.