The HBO show, a spinoff from Matt Reeves’ 2022 movie ‘The Batman,’ premieres Sept. 19.

'The Penguin'

‘The Penguin’ Courtesy of WB Discovery

While Colin Farrell was “grateful” to play the Penguin in the upcoming HBO show of the same name, he isn’t sure if he would ever want to “put that fucking suit and that fucking head on again.”

The actor got candid about the intensity of the role in a recent interview with Total Film magazine, responding to the idea of returning for a second season of The Penguin, if it scores a renewal: “I don’t know, man.

“Don’t get me wrong — I loved it — but it got in on me a little bit. By the end of it, I was bitching and moaning to anyone who would listen to me that I fucking wanted it to be finished. I tried to remind them that I had ‘grumpy gratitude,’” Farrell explained. “I was still grateful and still honored — I grew up watching Burgess Meredith [who played the villainous role in the 1960s TV series], and then Danny DeVito [in Tim Burton’s 1992 film Batman Returns] was my Penguin — so being a part of the lineage of that storytelling, I really did feel privileged.”

However, “by the end of it,” the actor was ready to wrap everything up, between the prosthetics, suit and headspace he found himself in.

“It’s not like I didn’t know who I was, and I was going out and burning cars and shit, but…if you take what Matt Reeves created and then what Lauren [LeFranc, showrunner] did and what Mike [Marino, prosthetics and makeup designer] did and put them all together, it was a really powerful experience,” Farrell said.

“Lauren said, ‘Look, if I could find a way that makes sense, would you talk about it?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely,’” the actor added of a potential second season. “And maybe, in a year, I would. But when I finished I was like, ‘I never want to put that fucking suit and that fucking head on again.’”

While the series is a spinoff from Matt Reeves’ 2022 movie The Batman, the filmmaker previously told SFX magazine that fans should not expect to see Robert Pattinson’s Batman in the TV project.

“I feel like it’s an extension of what is fundamentally there. We know this is the world of Batman,” Reeves said of the show. “You’re going down a different alley. So the specter of Batman is there. The specter of the Riddler is there. The specter of everything that happens in the last movie is there. It informs it. And it’s exactly where we begin.”