Penguin Director Craig Zobel Gets the Sopranos Comparisons and Wants You to Look Past Them

Two years after Matt Reeves’ take on Batman, Max is taking us back to Gotham City with The Penguin . It’s an ambitious project, one that hopes you’ll care enough about this strange, horrible man to watch for eight hours across two months, but it has the vision to make that hope a reality. I spoke with Craig Zobel, who directed The Penguin’s first three episodes, about his work on After Hours, the show’s premiere; what he wanted to achieve, and what he thinks about the immediate comparisons between The Penguin and The Sopranos.

Zobel says he set himself two tasks for the series’ first episode, creating an interesting and believable handoff from Matt Reeves’ 2022 The Batman film and setting up what he calls the first act – a trilogy of episodes, each told from a different character’s perspective. After Hours puts Oswald “Oz” Cobb, the Penguin, played by Colin Farrell, at the center.

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Events at the end of Reeves’ movie form the series’ backdrop. As Gotham slowly recovers from the catastrophe The Riddler caused in the film, a new opportunity arises for Cobb. The Riddler killed the head of the Falcone mafia family, creating a power vacuum in Gotham’s underworld, and at the start of After Hours, Cobb kills the Falcone heir. By “accident”. Look, the guy laughed at him. Then, Cobb hastily pieces together a rather daft plan to revitalize his drug business and pull one over on Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), the new head of the family – not a good idea at all.

The predicament Cobb puts himself in serves as the narrative link between Reeves’ film and the series, but Zobel spent a lot of time thinking how to bridge the two in ways that extended beyond just storytelling. He says he wanted a sense of groundedness for After Hours, an approach he says working on Mare of Easttown helped him refine, and a feeling of “being present,” something you could look at and believe might happen now. That’s particularly ambitious, seeing as Zobel also wanted to give After Hours and a specific aesthetic reminiscent of 1990s analog – hence the limited role of modern tech such as smart devices – a vibe he says stood out to him from Reeves’ film, and the attitude of a scrappy neo-noir thriller in the style of John Cassavetes’ 1976 film Killing of a Chinese Bookie.

All that means the Penguin’s debut episode is, unsurprisingly, unlike other shows in the genre, including Marvel’s Agatha All Along, the season’s other big hero show. However, Zobel says he didn’t approach After Hours with superhero cynicism, even though he understands why some people have hero fatigue. Rather than consciously making something that stands out from the rest of the genre, he says he just wanted to help tell a story about a character he considers fascinating.

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Cobb’s weaknesses, outsized ego, pettiness, and glaring insecurities – all of this is what Zobel wanted to explore in The Penguin’s first episode. With organized crime and overbearing mother figures, though, it’s little surprise that viewers quickly honed in on similarities between The Penguin and The Sopranos. Zobel says he gets it. These comparisons are inevitable.

“Everyone sort of knows that we're making a story in New York about the mafia after this family has existed, and it's in all of our cultural DNA that we know what [The Sopranos series] is,” Zobel says. “It doesn't surprise me that people [note similarities], but it really was a thing that was like, ‘That will just happen because we were telling the story like this.’

“I know that some people kind of pointed to [Livia] and The Sopranos and that relationship. But what's interesting is that if you actually kind of look back at the history of Oswald, the old versions of the Penguin story always had that kind of relationship dynamic [with his mother]. So that aspect does actually predate The Sopranos.”

Zobel and Penguin writer Lauren LeFranc have more depth and nuance in mind for the situation with Oz’s mother – played by Deirdre O’Connell, a stroke of casting luck that Zobel calls one of his favorite things about the show. The framing of Oz’s return home and the contrast between urban squalor and comparatively less squalid suburbia with its rows of neat, if slightly ratty, shotgun-style houses, all put me in mind of the kind of American Dream gone wrong stories so common in the middle of the 20th century, where a desperate person does dreadful things just to achieve the consumer comforts that they think comprise the good life.

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I asked Zobel if that was intentional, and he says that even though it’s not explicitly written into the series, that concept describes Oz’s story in the background material the cast and crew worked with. Oz’s primary goal after starting his career was getting his mother to a safe and prosperous place and surrounding himself with the trappings of success and power to cover over his faults.

It’s a ‘50s dream in a ‘90s world with the 2020s’ lack of opportunity, in other words, and that last part makes it fitting that one of Zobel’s visual inspirations for this episode was the work of Gordon Parks. Parks was a photographer who specialized in documenting the dark underside of American glamor, the disparity between rich and poor, and most of all, issues of racial justice and equality from the 1940s through the 1970s. The Penguin is, so far, rather muted on the kind of racial inequalities Parks’ photography captured, outside Victor being at a clear disadvantage compared to the show’s white characters. LeFranc has said she wants to examine how ineffective white men grasp at and eventually seize power thanks to opportunities only they get, though, so that may change in later episodes.

With so much riding on the first episode, from establishing characters to creating a setting and scenario that made people want to watch for seven more hours, I was curious what Zobel considered the biggest challenge and got an unexpected answer. He said it was the scene where Sofia Falcone interrogates Oz, the latter of whom is nude and strapped to a chair, but what made it difficult wasn’t the scene’s brutality. It was scheduling.

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Milioti and Farrell are staring at each other for almost the entirety of the scene, an intense moment that escalates quickly and ends in murder. Zobel tells me having one of them not present was never an option, else the scene wouldn’t have the wild energy it needed to work. Zobel also didn’t want Farrell stuck in his prosthetics and makeup for an unreasonable amount of time, which meant trying to create the perfect moment where the team could film the scene in a comparatively short amount of time and move on.

“We kept moving further and further down the schedule because we felt like we just really needed to have a good plan for it,” Zobel says. “Considering it's a person sitting in a chair, it was a wildly technical thing to get right.”

It might have taken longer than expected, but the team pulled it off and ended After Hours with a blend of gruesomeness and levity that added some welcome balance after such a dark scene. I ask Zobel what he wants people to think when they finish Penguin’s first episode and get a glimpse of what he, LeFranc, and the rest of the team have in store, and he gives a candid response.

“The boring and honest answer is that I hope people want to watch the next episode,” he says. “I hope that people feel like we achieved something that was in the same range as what Matt [Reeves] was doing, and I hope that people feel like they are getting to see one of our most interesting actors do some of his most unique work.”