SPOILER WARNING: This article discusses plot points from the series premiere of “The Penguin”, now streaming on Max.

The climax of the premiere episode of HBO’s “The Penguin” sees Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb being stripped naked and tortured by Cristin Milioti’s Sofia Falcone.

Falcone does this because she justifiably suspects Oz is responsible for the murder of Alberto Falcone, who is her brother — and the son of notorious crime boss Carmine Falcone, who was killed by Paul Dano’s Riddler in Matt Reeves’ 2022 film, “The Batman.”

The scene is horrifying and chilling, made even more grotesque by the fact that Oz is naked and exposed. Farrell’s makeup and prosthetics team doubled down on capturing Oz’s, ahem… physicality as accurately as possible.

Although Oz’s body isn’t shown to the public in its entirety, that doesn’t mean the team didn’t create prosthetic genitals for Oz and Farrell.

Farrell emphasizes that Variety how grateful he was to Michael Marino, the prosthetics designer for “The Penguin,” for “being nice enough to make Oz, let’s say, anatomically correct. I had a piece of Velcro to stick on and a nice retro bunch.” These additional prosthetics, specific to the torture scene, were in addition to the layers of makeup and prosthetics he already wore on his body and face to physically transform into The Penguin.

“It gave me this surreal discomfort, which was weird because it was just makeup. It was so uncomfortable that I had to ask for a towel between takes to cover myself,” Farrell says. “That was kind of a weird psychological limbo that you can find yourself in when you’re the canvas for something as powerful as the makeup that’s designed for it.”

He continues: “I felt incredibly exposed, even though I wasn’t. I was completely covered, but I was covered by a naked man. And it’s not that I thought I was him, but it had a very strange effect on my ego.”

“The Penguin” is a crime thriller spinoff series produced by HBO, set in the world of Reeves’ 2022 Batman blockbuster. The story, which picks up approximately a week after the events of the film, chronicles Cobb’s meteoric rise to become one of the most notorious players in Batman’s rogues gallery.

Lauren LeFranc serves as showrunner on the series, with Reeves and director Craig Zobel serving as executive producers. In addition to Farrell and Milioti, “The Penguin” stars Deidre O’Connell as Oz’s mother, Francis Cobb; Rhenzy Feliz as his young protégé; and Victor Aguilar and Clancy Brown as rival crime boss Salvatore Maroni.

The episode ends with Oz turning the tables and manipulating the Falcones into believing that Maroni killed Alberto to avenge their takeover of Maroni’s criminal empire.

LeFranc wanted Oz’s ability to get out of this deadly situation to show that he’s not someone to be messed with. He’s calculating, ambitious, and has foresight — and his ability to game the system allows him to always be two steps ahead of his enemies.

“Oz is a gamer; he’s a schemer. He’s very smart and calculating, and we show in the first episode how impulsive he can be, especially when he’s being laughed at and rejected,” LeFranc says. “He’s very resourceful in his violence and his ambition.”

“I didn’t want to end on a complete cliffhanger,” she continues. “I wanted to set the tone for the audience for the kind of show we wanted to be. A man like Oz can do all this incredible violence. This woman can torture him, and then at the end of the day he can still sit there and eat a slushie and be seemingly unfazed. And that makes him a very strange character, and I wanted to show that.”

The final moments of the episode show Oz sharing a slushie with Vic Aguilar, a stark contrast to the episode’s opening, in which Vic attempts to lift Oz’s car tires. After threatening him with death for his transgression, Oz ultimately agrees to let Vic prove himself — to test him to see if Vic can run with him and help Oz ascend to the top of criminal power in Gotham.

Fun Fact: For those fans of the Batman comics who noticed how the scene with the tires resembled the scene where Jason Todd is introduced to the Dark Knight himself before he eventually takes on the role of Robin in the comics, that comparison is intentional.

“I read a lot of comics, and I wanted to use different forms of inspiration and pay homage to things that have come before. I initially created Victor from a position of, you know, ‘Batman has Robin. Why can’t Oz have somebody?'” LeFranc says. “In our grounded criminal world, young men are realistically raised and taught to be violent in the mob. That’s part of it; it’s that grooming culture. And so Oz really grooms Victor in a lot of ways, and I was interested in telling that story.”

Vic is a street fighter from Gotham’s East Side. Although his relationship with Oz starts off on somewhat hostile terms, the two form a unique bond and work together to fend off the Falcones.

When asked what Vic sees in someone like Oz and why he chooses to stay with him (other than the threat Oz poses to his life, of course!), Feliz said, “I think one of the things that goes through his mind is, ‘What is the path that I have laid out for me? If I don’t go with Oz, what do I have?'”

“He sees Oz as the answer to that question. There’s an attraction to the life that Oz leads,” Feliz says. “There’s this money, there’s this power, there’s just this trust that Oz has in him, and I think Victor finds that very attractive.

“He starts to think, ‘You know, maybe I’m can make something of myself. Even though my life hasn’t amounted to much, now I have the chance to be part of something bigger than myself.’ That makes him excited, and even though he feels like he’s making the wrong decision, this is the decision he wants to make.”

Episode 1 of “The Penguin” brilliantly plays into the world Reeves created for “The Batman” and lays the foundation for Penguin’s future in the franchise.

In this article, Farrell breaks down the most shocking moments from the premiere and shares what fans can expect from the series in the future.

It is unthinkable that so much work went into creating these prosthetics that, quite frankly, would never be shown to the public.

Well, we didn’t know if the camera was going to be a wide shot. Mike hedged his bets; he leaves nothing to chance. I was strapped to the chair for hours. I couldn’t move because they had to mold it. They had to make the body and mold it into the position that I was going to be in, because there’s not a lot of give when you do limbs. They had to wheel me in a wheelchair from the trailer to the set. It took six or seven hours of makeup.

It took you seven hours to apply your makeup?

I was in the makeup chair for three hours, and then they put me in the wheelchair for the next three or four hours. And then they wheeled me about a thousand feet to the set, put me in there, and that was it for a couple of hours while we were filming. It was pretty cool, though.

The torture scene was by far the most climactic in the episode. What was it like filming it with Cristin Milioti?

Oh my God, it’s extraordinary to work with her. With some actors, you have an organic familiarity with it, and with others, you have to work at it and have it on camera — and it doesn’t have to exist off camera. But I had a great affinity for everything Cristin did from the beginning. She was incredibly dominant, and there was also this deep well of pain that her character was operating from. One of the most incredible things Lauren did in crafting this entire story into eight hours of television was she really paid attention to each character. Just because the show is called The Penguin, it’s not just my story. So I loved that.

What kind of man do you think Oz is, after orchestrating his plan to deliver Alberto’s body to the Falcones?

He will do whatever it takes. He is uncompromising in his singularity in terms of his vision of what he has to do. Betrayal is something he doesn’t even believe in: you just do what you have to do to get ahead. And he was raised on his own dime. I mean, his mother raised him, but he lost his two brothers at a very young age. His father was never around, so there’s a certain amount of deprivation that he’s internalized. But it just means that he operates in the world with an extraordinary ability to understand human behavior. Maybe not so much his own, as is often the case, but he can understand other people’s behavior, their needs, their wants, their desires. Where their weak spots are, and what their weak spots are — and he manipulates those to his own advantage without apology.

How does the brutal shooting of Alberto at the beginning of the episode fit into that caricature?

So the Alberto thing wasn’t a plan. It was, as he tells his mother, it was an “impulse.” And she says, “No, it wasn’t an impulse. It was instinct.”

Well, you know, impulse is instinct that is not guarded, not controlled. You have an instinct for something and then you are compelled to do it. Then the compulsion to do it and the decision to act on it becomes the impulse that manifests. So with him, he is very deliberate. His ability to plan is extraordinary, but his impulsiveness is incredibly dangerous to be around.

What do you think Oz sees in Vic? Why does he decide to nurture that relationship instead of literal the killing?

What I see in him is vulnerability. I probably see, without meaning to, an opportunity for companionship. Oz is probably lonelier than he realizes, but it’s that vulnerability, I think, and that longing for the way Vic is begging me to spare his life. The energy of that plea, the desperation of that plea, is born of a person who I can get to do a lot of different things for me. That Oz can do many different things for him.

I should stop talking about Oz in the first person. It’s only been eight months…

This interview has been edited and shortened.