There have been rumblings for a while that Mark Strong will appear in The Penguin, but that's finally 100% official courtesy of a new X post from The Batman spin-off's X account.
Strong will play a younger version of Carmine Falcone in the series; John Turturro portrayed the character in The Batman and it's his death which created the power vacuum Oz Cobb now looks to fill in his TV show.
Some are bound to argue that there were bigger and better roles for Strong in the Bat-verse than this, while there are also questions about why Turturro wasn't brought back to play this younger version of Falcone (makeup and minimal VFX might have been enough to pull that off).
Still, we're excited to see what the Kingsman and Green Lantern star brings to the table here.
Screen Rant recently caught up with executive producer Matt Reeves and asked why The Penguin is set only a week after the flood which laid waste to Gotham City at the end of The Batman.
"The whole idea is that this story is about that moment that follows the movie. There's an opportunity where Carmine Falcone has had a stranglehold on power for the last 20 years in this place, and now he's dead," he explained. "And so someone like Oz, who really believes that he can get more, but no one else believes that this is his moment to strike."
"And we sort of teased that at the end of The Batman as he's staring out over the city. And we really wanted to pick things up in that moment."
Reeves added, "The other parameters that we gave to Lauren were that obviously we know that we want Oz to be in the next movie, and we know the events of that movie, and so we just said we need him to have this rise to power to the point that we get him to, and then there needs to be these events that sort of give you the sense that he's going to be entering the movie in this way."
You can see that first look at Strong's Falcone and a clip from The Penguin (head to the 6:52 mark) below.
The Penguin's cast includes Colin Farrell (Oz Cobblepot), Cristin Milioti (Sofia Falcone), Rhenzy Feliz (Victor Aguilar), Michael Kelly (Johnny Viti), Shohreh Aghdashloo (Nadia Maroni), Deirdre O’Connell (Francis Cobb), Clancy Brown (Salvatore Maroni), James Madio (Milos Grapa), Scott Cohen (Luca Falcone), Michael Zegen (Alberto Falcone), Carmen Ejogo (Eve Karlo), and Theo Rossi (Dr. Julian Rush).
The series is executive produced by Matt Reeves, Dylan Clark, Colin Farrell, Lauren LeFranc, who writes and serves as showrunner, Craig Zobel, who directs the first three episodes, and Bill Carraro.
Based on characters created for DC by Bob Kane with Bill Finger, The Penguin is produced by Reeves' 6th & Idaho Productions and Dylan Clark Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television, where Reeves and 6th & Idaho are under an overall deal. Daniel Pipski also serves as executive producer.
The Penguin premieres on HBO and Max on September 19.