Thirteen Lives' Colin Farrell Tells Us When The Penguin HBO Max Series Starts Filming - Exclusive

It feels like Colin Farrell is everywhere on screen in 2022. He's played a mournful father trying to save his family's dying robot in "After Yang" and the heroic cave diver John Volanthen in "Thirteen Lives." He reunites with writer-director Martin McDonagh and co-star Brendan Gleeson from "In Bruges" for "The Banshees of Inisherin" this fall. The performance of Farrell's the most people have seen this year, however, is the one where he's least recognizable: under an extreme amount of prosthetic makeup as villainous gangster Oswald Cobblepot/The Penguin in "The Batman."

Farrell's Penguin was a secondary antagonist in Matt Reeves' three-hour superhero epic, but he stole the show whenever he was on screen. If everything goes according to plan, the Penguin will be getting his own spin-off series on HBO Max. Looper got the chance to speak with Farrell as part of a press interview for "Thirteen Lives" (now streaming on Prime Video), and he told us the plan for when the Penguin series will start filming.

Though Colin Farrell did not know a specific date, he says he heard the series is scheduled to start filming in January or February 2023. He told us that he'd read the pilot script, which he described as "so good. It was so tasty." Speaking on the status of the production, he expressed some caution that things might not go according to plan, saying, "You never know in this thing until you're actually standing in front of camera and they say, 'Action.'"

This caution feels extra warranted in light of the shake-ups happening at HBO Max. Warner Bros. Discovery pulled the plug on "Batgirl," an HBO Max movie that had already completed shooting, and with CEO David Zaslav promising both spending cuts and restructuring plans for the DC properties, the fate of an expensive DC HBO Max series that's still in pre-production feels especially up in the air. Hopefully, audiences will still get to enjoy this "tasty" spin-off, but nothing is certain.

"Thirteen Lives" is now streaming on Prime Video.