Colin Farrell on the most shocking scene in The Penguin finale.

Editor’s Note: The following story contains spoilers for the eighth episode of “The Penguin.”

CNN
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When our interview was over, it was Colin Farrell’s turn to ask questions. He stood and led me to the side of a crowded junket room. Farrell wanted my opinion on the finale of The Penguin. “I know it was dark,” he said with a hint of concern on his famous eyebrows. “But it was to dark?”

We spoke in September, after the first episode aired, when few people had seen or predicted how pitch black HBO’s The Batman spinoff would be (HBO, like CNN, is part of Warner Bros. Discovery).

Sure, life was cheap, Arkham Asylum was miserable, and Gotham’s institutions were corrupt. So far, so normal for a story set in the Batman universe. But the series, which follows Oz Cobb’s rise from the gutter to crime boss, plunged headfirst into darkness in the home stretch. Audiences saw fratricide, attempted infanticide, and an affair with Oz’s mother (somehow worse than it sounds). Then there was the murder of Oz’s right-hand man Victor Aguilar, which was the most heartbreaking scene in episode eight.

Many months after filming, Farrell still appears dismembered. He recalled that day on set was the hardest of a long shoot, which was interrupted by the SAG strike.

“Honestly… I know it’s just acting, and gosh, I’ve been doing this long enough. You go home, take off your costume and return to your life. But some scenes go deeper than others,” he recalls.

To recap: Victor, played by Rhenzy Feliz, became entangled in the world of Oz when he was caught trying to steal Oz’s Maserati in the first episode. Orphaned by the events of The Batman, the naive teenager was taken under Oz’s wing and pushed to do increasingly demanding tasks by his new boss, proving his loyalty. Their relationship was one of the few on The Penguin that didn’t switch from loyalty to betrayal every half episode. But after Oz defeated the Falcones and Maronis and became Gotham’s top dog, Victor became a dangling thread connecting Oz to his former life and his beloved mother. Victor had to go. And at the very moment of their victory, Oz strangled him on a park bench overlooking the city, leaving his body in the dirt and making the death look like an attack.

“We had a lot of time to prepare and think about it. There was a lot of discord between (Oz) and Victor and the friendship we had,” Farrell said.

“The crew was really invested in the story – we had spent a year together on and off – and the mood on set that night was pretty dark,” he said. “Everyone, the focusers, the cameramen, the boom operators, the craft service… it really wasn’t pleasant. We all knew what had to happen; it was just fiction. But it was so dark and it was so ugly and so unjustified.”

“We worked through it as quickly as possible,” Farrell added. “Everyone was very on point and we handled it brilliantly. But it was really, really ugly.”

The scene, which begins with Victor thanking Oz for “taking the risk” and calling him family, ends with him begging with his final breaths. It’s brutal and unflinching, with a shock factor given some of the biggest TV deaths of this century – like Christopher Moltisanti, who was euthanized by his “uncle” (actually his cousin) Tony in “The Sopranos,” or Hank, Walter White’s brother-in-law, Caught in the middle of a sideways hit in Breaking Bad.

Like Moltisanti’s death, Victor’s murder is driven by a similar self-interest. “Family: This is your strength. It drives you. “Fk, if it doesn’t make you weak too,” Oz says, putting his hand on Victor’s throat. “And I can’t have that anymore.”

For all his disgust, Farrell said he could understand how Oz justified himself. “One of the great pains of loving is that you’re more vulnerable and potentially tougher than you’ll ever be,” the actor said.

“If you have a child, you may realize that you can murder to protect your child. And because of the love you feel for your child, you are also capable of being hurt in ways you could never have imagined as an individual.”

Oz makes the disturbing decision to kill rather than protect one weak point (while his other weak point, his mother, remains on life support in squalid conditions despite her brain death). This means he loses any claim to be the Robin Hood or Pablo Escobar-like character he thinks he is, says Farrell.

“In the fifth or sixth episode he says to Victor, ‘Imagine you’re the man who helps people and people pay attention, that it makes a difference in people’s lives.’ So it’s a really important thing for (him) and I think it’s probably the point where he exists at his most benevolent. I think it’s sincere that he wants to help people; that he knows what it is like to live under the blessing of poverty.”

But Farrell added: “If given the choice between serving himself or serving others, he would always choose himself first from the start.”

By the end of the series, Oz had proven that. Alone at the top of the world and with no opportunities for advancement, there is only one direction for the penguin to go. We’ll have to wait until The Batman Part II in 2026 to see how far he can fall.