Colin Farrell's 'Penguin' makeup fooled his co-stars: 'You would never know'

Colin Farrell’s title character in the new gangster drama “The Penguin” is a Batman villain come to life in dangerous fashion, heavy-set, scarred and unforgettable. So much that you forget that the handsome Irish actor is under there somewhere.

Farrell is acting his fine feathered posterior off, obviously, but a major part of what redefines "The Penguin" (streaming now on Max) is the work of prosthetic makeup designer Mike Marino, which completely turns Farrell into ambitious mobster Oz Cobb. It’s so effective that it fooled co-stars like Cristin Milioti, who filmed with him for eight months. “I saw (Farrell) one time out of makeup. I would hear that voice and it was like someone had Freaky Friday'd. It was so strange,” she says. “You would never, ever know up close that there was makeup. It's incredible.”

Adds Farrell: “To move your face and see this face responding to your movements and it not look like you in any way, shape or form was a very powerful thing.”

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Marino, 47, has a pair of Oscar nominations: for "Coming 2 America," where he worked with Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall, and for director Matt Reeves' “The Batman," in which he first turned Farrell into the Penguin and also Barry Keoghan into a disfigured Joker. The makeup artist's varied resume over three decades also includes the new dark comedy “A Different Man” (in select theaters now, nationwide Oct. 4), “Black Swan,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” The Weeknd music videos and Heidi Klum’s Halloween costumes.

“It's been a constant creative life,” says the New York native, who started his three-decade career on “Saturday Night Live” when he was 19. “I’m grateful to still be able to do this and create characters."

Gangsters and birds influenced Colin Farrell's look in 'The Penguin'

The main thing Marino kept in mind in designing the Penguin was “no matter how human he may appear and how charming and charismatic, he is a Batman villain. Someone who is operating in a very dangerous underworld and it is ruthless,” he says. And Oz’s personality is reflected in his face: “There's one side that really is fairly natural and the other side is completely violent. His teeth are broken (and) flesh maybe hung off of his face at one point, stitched back together,” adds Marino. (The bad leg and foot that give Oz his limp are also on his scarred right side.)

Reeves had the idea that psychologically Oz was akin to John Cazale’s Fredo in “The Godfather” movies (“He was left behind and he wanted more,” Marino says), so this Penguin has a receding hairline in addition to a facade inspired by birds (but not past Penguins). Marino saw that penguins from the front have a V-shape to their face, which influenced Oz’s nose and angled, “animal-like” eyebrows.

When Farrell saw his Penguin look for the first time, “it just spoke volumes to me about him as a man, about his toughness but also a certain vulnerability, what it would be like to carry yourself through the world looking like that all pockmarked and scarred up,” the actor says. “The Penguin” series is “a descent into his madness and into his ultimate psychopathy,” and transformed by Marino’s prosthetics, “I felt like I was free to throw paint at the wall as aggressively as I could. And some of that was the liberation that was afforded me by not seeing myself.”

Makeup artist Mike Marino makes Sebastian Stan 'A Different Man'

Marino’s work is also essential to “A Different Man,” which stars Stan as a lonely New Yorker named Edward who has facial tumors caused by the genetic disorder neurofibromatosis. He undergoes an experimental treatment that fixes him superficially but not emotionally. Edward learns a play is being made of his life, desperately wants to star in it, and becomes jealous of the gregarious man who’s ultimately cast in the role – played by Adam Pearson, a British actor who lives with the condition.

Stan’s prosthetics are a “little variation” of Pearson’s actual face because the two characters had to play against each other in “this very layered psychological view of the inner self,” Marino says. “Adam Pearson's personality in the film is so charismatic and positive. He's embracing who he is and everyone loves him. And Sebastian's character is so shy and ashamed and he wants to get rid of the way he looks and to become fairly normal in a sense. And once he does, he doesn't know who he is anymore.”

Marino's work informed Stan "physically and internally," he says. "Being able to walk down the street in New York and not have anyone doubt that's how I looked, it changed everything.

“There are people who think when they see Edward in the movie, it's Adam and not me. It was transformative. It was immersive. It was all of it."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Colin Farrell's shocking 'Penguin' transformation explained