Sorry, Patriots fans, but the big viewing news this week isn’t FX’s “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez.” It’s “The Penguin,” on HBO and streaming on Max.
It’s such big news because, even if you don’t care a jot about supervillains and comic book stories, you’re likely aware of “The Penguin” thanks to all the talk about Colin Farrell’s transformation in the title role. No, he doesn’t look like a penguin. He looks even less like Colin Farrell. He looks like someone named Oswald Cobb (the Penguin’s given name): balding, overweight, the schlub that time forgot. Farrell’s all but unrecognizable. Talk about an actor disappearing into a role.
The movies have had a fair number of extreme transformations. Think of Robert De Niro putting on all those pounds in “Raging Bull” (and winning an Oscar) or Jessica Chastain’s cosmetological carryings-on in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” (also winning an Oscar).
Transformations that extensive have been rarer in television. Maybe that’s because, hard as they are to sustain over a movie’s two-hour running time, they’re that much harder to keep up over the course of multiple episodes — or entire seasons.
Rarer and harder doesn’t mean unknown. Before there was Farrell’s Penguin, there was Ethan Hawke’s John Brown, in “The Good Lord Bird.” Before Hawke, there was Bryan Cranston’s Walter White, in “Breaking Bad.” Before Cranston, there was René Auberjonois’s Odo, in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.”
With comedy, transformation and unrecognizability can be a license to kill (the way stand-up comics mean “kill,” not in the 007 sense). During her “Saturday Night Live” days, Kate McKinnon had an array of such characters. Her version of US Attorney General Jeff Sessions was in a class all its own. The ultimate transformation/unrecognizability situation would be McKinnon’s Sessions interviewed by Martin Short’s Jiminy Glick, with a surprise visit from Farrell’s Penguin, for good measure.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.