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Colin Farell on playing The Penguin in 'The Batman'

'The Batman' is out in UAE cinemas on March 3

Robert Pattinson will be finally be seen donning the Gotham City vigilante's cape as the highly anticipated 'The Batman' is set to release in the UAE cinemas on March 3.

Director Matt Reeves provides a fresh take on the DC Comics character who is still in his second year as the Caped Crusader. With early reviews in, the film is garnering huge praise for its portrayal of the Dark Knight -- some even calling it the closest to the comic book version.

Alongisde Pattinson, The Batman casts Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle, or Catwoman, Colin Farrell as The Penguin, and Paul Dano as The Riddler, the film's primary antagonist.

Farrell, popular for films like Total Recall, was unrecognisable as The Penguin. The actor speaks about his transformation and how he landed the role of the Batman's adversary in The Batman.

Excerpts from the interview:

So how did this role come to you?

I got a call from my agent, just saying did I know they were doing The Batman? He told me that Matt Reeves was directing the next Batman instalment and that they wanted to talk to me for The Penguin, which I was very excited at the thought of it.

What was it about this character and Matt's take on the story that drew you in?

I'm an actor for a living, but I also have a very robust child inside me that's still alive and well and seeking out the comfort of entertainment at times, and still, as a man, relates to things that I loved as a child or as a teenager. And I grew up watching Adam West in the TV show and Burgess Meredith, and what have you, playing The Penguin. And I also loved Tim Burton's first Batman, and his subsequent Batman [Returns], with Danny DeVito as Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman. So, when I heard, I got just terribly excited at the thought of being able to embody, to approach, a character as iconic as Penguin. And I had known Matt Reeve's work from Cloverfield and from Let Me In, and then the Ape films, and Matt's an extraordinary filmmaker. He is one of those rare filmmakers that really, I feel, mixes altruistic brilliance with a sense of commercial entertainment as well. And he makes films for the masses, but not to the concession of any kind of emotional or psychological intellect, or specificity, so I was delighted when I heard that. And then I read the script, and I sat with Matt.

This film takes place early on in the Batman career, so to speak, so it's early for The Penguin, too, or Oz, rather. That gave you an opportunity to introduce a version of this character that we haven’t seen in film, as well.

Yes. I mean, he's referred to in the film as Penguin, but it was expressly articulated in the script that he's not particularly happy with that moniker. It's not something that he's embodied yet. It's not something that he's stepped into. I don't know if he's never okay with it. I don't know if it's ever something that he adapts to and is okay with, because he understands that it can instill fear in people. But here he's Oz and he's somebody who's on the rise—at least that's how he sees himself. He's working within a criminal organization, but he's not at the top of the organization. I mean, he's close to the man who is the top, Falcone, played by John Turturro. I don't know if he's his right hand man, but if not, he's pretty close to being his right hand man.

Pursuant to my conversations with Matt, he's a complex character who has his own fears and his own hopes and his own deeply burning ambitions to make a success of himself. He comes from very humble origins and is dangerous, like anyone who exists in a world of violence that has a deep ambition. He's a dangerous man, I suppose.

He certainly looks it—can you talk a little about finding the character, physically? You look extraordinary in this film.

When Mike Marino did his work on the makeup and designed the face, pretty much designed the face of Oz, between that, what was on the page, and then conversations with Matt about Oz's backstory and possibly where Oz was heading, then it all became an incredibly exciting prospect for me. I wasn't sure when I first read the script how to get into it or what I could do with it. But conversations, as I say, with Matt and then seeing the extraordinary work that Mike Marino did, Oz just all came to life immediately.

The accent too, the voice. How did the voice inform your performance, how did you find that in you?

I have a dialect coach that I work with, that I've done about seven or eight films with now. Her name is Jessica Drake and she's wonderful. She's a pain in my ass, but that's what she's paid to be. [LAUGHS] I'm very grateful for her time and attention and the dialect work with her. I think dialect work with anyone who really knows what they're up to as a dialect coach, they're more than just working on sounds and accent. They're investigating the socio-economic background of the character, the emotional and psychological background of the person—because we're not all just sounds that are the result of where we geographically grew up. That is the most prominent aspect of an accent, but it's the way we sound, the way we articulate ourselves and our cadence… All those things play into the design of an accent.

And they all, of course, are sourced from psychology and emotion and all that kind of stuff, so Jessica was amazing. She was an amazing source and I worked with her for a couple of months on various sounds and we played around, because there wasn't a directive. They said I could do it in my own accent. I thought that would be a mistake, for various reasons. And then, as I said, I had done a bit of work with Jessica, and then when we had a day at Warner Bros. on the lot, where Mike Marino and his team, and the wardrobe team, and me, and my sister, and my son came—and it was actually, in 20 years of doing films, it was one of the most magic days I will ever have.

Because I was really... I mean, I've been seeing behind the curtain, behind the veil for 20 years now. You get used to it a little bit. You try not to get inured to it and you don't take advantage of it, but you get used to it. It becomes somewhat familiar and thereby, it loses a bit of its magic. This day, it was magic. I was transported and it was... We were all there and we were all a little bit nervous, and we were all a little bit excited and there was so many people, I was one of 20 people there... I mean, there's no character I'll ever play, I don't think, certainly not to this point, that I can claim less total ownership over than this character, which I'm fine with. [LAUGHS] But that day, when the stuff went on, was the first time that the voice came out and it was fun. The mask, it's a very powerful thing to be so deeply hidden behind a mask like that. It's really powerful, and I would've thought that it’d be somewhat constricting or limiting, but it was the total opposite. It was an absolute liberation. So, that was the first time I heard it, when the voice came out and I was walking around, and it felt good. It all just went from being an idea and an abstraction to being Oz.

What do you hope audiences will experience when they see this film?

Matt's worked so hard. I hope it just goes gangbusters for him.