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In 2020, Colin Farrell begins a six-year back and forth between two opposing characters, Oz “Penguin” Cobb and John Sugar.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t some similarities to the Gotham City gangster Penguin And a private investigator in Los Angeles sugar. They are both movie lovers. They both have a knack for anticipating human behavior in order to obtain their preferred outcome, and both have a knack for weaving (or wriggling) their way out of a predicament.
However, their basic selves differ night and day as Oz will hurt anyone and everyone to get what he wants, even his own flesh and blood. Conversely, Oz is as altruistic as can be, and will often endure great pain if it means defending the defenseless. Oh, and he happens to be an alien.
For Farrell, sugar And his time in the two seasons as the compassionate PI serves as an antidote and a “sanity check” for the unrecognizable, toxic Penguin persona he’s transformed into through three-hour make-ups on Matt Reeves. Batman And Lauren Lefranc Penguin series. (The Irish actor will soon reprise Oz Cobb for the third time in Reeves’ film) Batman: Part Two.)
“I love playing Penguin. It’s not a bitch, but it is.” So dark. “The character has such venom inside her,” Farrell says. Hollywood Reporter In support of sugar Season two. “Sugar, on the other hand, is very nice and optimistic and very decent. It’s a lovely moral cleanser.”
After the first season reveals that Sugar is an alien, his fellow aliens are harmed by human forces present, forcing them to retreat to their home planet. However, Sugar stays behind, hoping to find his missing sister, Jane. But at the end of Season 2, the path turns cold, and the worst-case scenario is assumed about her fate. Thus, he turns his grief into a new case regarding the sudden disappearance of Ji Moon (Raymond Lee), so that his boxer brother, Danny Moon (Jin Ha), does not have to experience the grief that Sugar feels for his brother.
After the strange rug-pulling, sugarwhich is operated by Very bad alum Sam Catlin in Season 2, could have easily gone in a more sci-fi direction, but instead became a more realistic story set in Los Angeles. The search for Ji Moon brings Sugar up against many of the real-life issues the city faces, such as homelessness and the fentanyl crisis. As a producer, Farrell emphasized a certain sensitivity so that the show would not come across as overtly exploitative or virtuous.
“I would be horrified that when you portray any aspect of the homeless community in this city, you patronize them, or infantilize them, or make them weird, or just use it for the show to say, ‘Oh, look, we care so much,’” Farrell says candidly, “I hope we’re not remiss.”
Below, during a conversation with THRFarrell also discusses how Season 1’s extraterrestrial development will be expanded in Season 2, and whether or not that’s possible sugar It is a human story or an immigrant story.
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I spoke to you last time Penguin While you were in the group sugar Season two. I’ve gone back and forth between Oz and Sugar the past few years. Have Sugar’s inherent morality become a moral purgatory for Oz’s evil ways?
Yes, sanity check. I love playing penguin. What a dream for a kid who grew up watching Burgess Meredith Batman ’66 And then to Danny DeVito, my old friend, at Tim Burton Batman returns. It’s great to play this role, to work with him [prosthetic designer] Mike Marino and doing this whole thing with makeup is amazing. This isn’t a bitch, but it is So dark. The character has such poison in him, and you can get rid of it a little bit.
Sugar, on the other hand, is very nice, very upbeat, and basically very decent. He sees the best in everyone. He sees through people’s pain and sees the good that lies underneath. It’s a lovely moral palate cleanser.
Sugar may be an alien, but he’s more human than most humans. As you point out, it’s really touching when he comments to himself about how badly humans treat those who suffer the most in pain. Has Sugar’s perspective made you more aware of how insensitive we are to those who need help?
I don’t know if I’m more aware of the reality of people’s struggle. You are assailed by the reality of fighting for the most vulnerable among us. It is usually the smallest and the largest. You have a kind of active drive when you’re in your teens and twenties and thirties to at least stand up and fight against something you don’t believe in. But when you are a child, or old, or infirm, you are physically at your weakest, and you have no voice.
Sometimes, those who love a child or those who love an elderly person are able to fight. But even those people who are taking care of their children or their 84-year-old father are so burdened and so exhausted with care that they do not have the drive to fight. Does this show reveal to me more how the most vulnerable among us suffer as a result of disinterest, apathy and greed? Not really, unfortunately. It’s everywhere you look.
Sugar and Oz are both movie fans as well. How do their relationships compare to the movie?
Oz has learned a lot about humans from being bullied on playgrounds and from watching his mother and siblings – or from watching Rex Calabrese and his boys on the street corner outside the bar – but he has also learned about humans from watching movies. And Sugar, more than anything else, because he had no prior experience with humans, had learned a lot about the human condition from observing films. They are both very observant people. But the main difference is that Oz only uses his understanding of human behavior to help himself. Sugar uses it because he wants to help eight billion people on planet Earth.
In Season 2, Sugar’s missing sister haunts him so much that he stops at nothing to reunite two Korean brothers. I bring this up because you produce this show with your sister, Claudine Farrell. Did you both create the brotherhood stories in this series?
Claudine! She’s next door. (He laughs.) No, we didn’t. We’re both producers, but Sam Catlin, our showrunner, and his team of writers, as they should be, had the space to think about the arc. He came up with these two Korean immigrants, the Moon brothers, and I loved the dynamic.
Los Angeles is a city with a very large immigrant population. I am an immigrant. Just because I’m an actor in Hollywood and all that crap doesn’t mean I’m not an immigrant to this country. So I loved it when Sam got his point across the season, and Raymond Lee and Jin Ha did a great job with the Moon Brothers, Ji, and Danny.
Sam feels it sugarAt its simplest level, it’s an immigrant’s story, but I think it’s a more human story. I get it sugar An immigrant from a far away land, but it’s a story that uses the symbol of this alien creature to explore the human condition more than anything else.
Sugar was ordered by his fellow aliens not to assimilate during his time on Earth. Do you remember one of the first ways you noticed yourself being included in your life as an Angeleno?
Honestly, this was the first time I used the word awesome. I’m also worried about my accent, man. I know it sounds superficial. But dialect, for many of us, is a very important anchor and a very important source of identification. It is an auditory tribal invitation to each other. I just said the word “other” thicker than I would have said it if I hadn’t spoken about my accent. That’s how deep and complex it is in the mind. I have yet to hear anyone say I look American at home [in Ireland]but I know that my accent has softened a lot over the years.
The first season’s twist that Sugar is an alien recontextualized the entire series, and while there were some great twists in season two, the writers didn’t try to outdo themselves Which degree. Were you glad that Sam and co. Why try to force another huge reveal that changes the show just because people responded so well to it in the first season?
Yes, I think so. This was a big shadow that hung over the first season. We didn’t know what episode the reveal would be, and we didn’t know what Sugar would look like when his true character was revealed. So there was a little bit of tension around that, and it was nice to wrap it up in episode six of season one. The way we explore this revelation in Season 2 is more from the character’s point of view.
There’s a bit of backstory with Laura San Giacomo’s character that shows through their interactions what Sugar was like when he first got here. It allows the audience to experience how much he has changed and evolved in his time among humans. Laura San Giacomo’s character is a very important one because she is an indicator and warning sign of what could befall Sugar or any of his fellow species if they lose their way in the experience of being human. If they become too involved, they could lose themselves and suffer dire consequences.
Now that Sugar’s eccentric nature is known to the public, Season 2 could have leaned more towards sci-fi, but it mostly deals with real issues in Los Angeles: homelessness, fentanyl, climate, and a number of institutional problems. Why did you make this choice to visit your site more?
I loved it because I love Los Angeles. I’ve grown to love Los Angeles over the years. I can’t say I understand it the way I understand Dublin. I don’t understand Everything About Dublin. It’s hard to understand everything about a place with two million people colliding with each other. But here, I don’t understand it. I’ve been in LA for 25 years, and I love that it’s still so new to me. It has a lot of texture and a lot of different pockets of cultures coexisting at the same time. There’s K-Town, where much of the story takes place this season. There’s a Thai town, there’s Salvadoran enclaves, and of course there’s a large Mexican population. It is an endlessly fascinating city.
So the idea that we had to go beyond the issues and the beauty that this city deals with on a daily basis, was not convincing. This show is not a sociological treatise about the struggles of a contemporary American city. It really isn’t. It has a lighter touch than that in terms of design, but at the same time, I really felt it was important to address the fentanyl epidemic here. I really felt it was important to address something that exists in every country in the world, which is institutional corruption, especially of a political orientation and leaning. Through Raymond Lee and Jin Ha’s Ji and Danny, we explore the issue of immigration to some extent. It’s not a heavy show, but at the same time, you can’t be superficial.
You also want to be really careful. I would be horrified that when you portray any aspect of the homeless community in this city, you patronize them, or infantilize them, or make them weird, or just use it for show to say, “Oh, we care so much.” When we shot some of those scenes [at the homeless encampment] Down the tunnel, there were a couple of shots there and some makeup choices were made where I was like, “Ah, we’ve got to be careful here.” I’m not saying we’ve achieved this in a respectable way. I’m not saying we treated that segment of the Los Angeles community with the dignity that every segment of society deserves to be treated with, but the concern was that we wouldn’t achieve that. I hope we didn’t fall short.
But yeah, this series doesn’t lean into sci-fi as much as it could. If we go into future seasons, I’d like to do more sci-fi, but never give up on what the show should be at its core. Before we shot the pilot [four] Years ago, we talked about how this show is about humans in Los Angeles, who are, to greater and lesser degrees, like humans everywhere.
Are you ready for another sweaty summer under your 30-pound Oz Cobb suit and 2 pounds of silicone rubber?
(He laughs.) Praise be to God,[[Batman: Part Two]It won’t be all summer, man. I only have about two or three scenes. So I’ll only be there for a few weeks, but the good thing is that I’ll enjoy the movie more than I would have if I’d been in it more.
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sugar New episodes of Season 2 are currently airing every Friday through August 7.
