Posted in: HBO, TV | Tagged: clancy brown, colin farrell, The Penguin

The Penguin Star Clancy Brown Reacts to [SPOILER] Unexpected Fate

Clancy Brown breaks down the events and climactic fight in HBO and DC Studios' The Penguin Episode 7: "Top Hat" and the fate of [SPOILER].

With HBO's The Penguin Ep. 7: "Top Hat" officially in the books, another major piece of the puzzle falls into Oz Cobb's (Colin Farrell) lap in his rise in Gotham's criminal underworld. As it turns out, manipulating crime families behind their backs like the Falcones, rather Gigantes, and the Maroni has dire costs. At the end of the previous episode, "Gold Summit," Salvatore Maroni (Clancy Brown) leads a crew to strike Oz's safehouse where Francis Cobb (Deirdre O'Connell) is staying with Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz) and tries to keep her safe. Brown spoke about the events of the latest episode with your complimentary major spoilers warning.

The Penguin Star Clancy Brown on That Major Episode 7 Surprise

The beginning of "Top Hat" finds Oz going back to the apartment only to find the place broken into, Vic unconscious, and his mother missing. As Salvatore makes his way back to the apartment, Oz pleads with Vic to flee and alert his crew at the Gotham sewers, his base of operations. As Maroni reaches Oz, they take him captive, but not before he gets some shots in from his golf club for good measure. While Francis is taken to Sofia Gigante's (Cristin Milioti) place, Oz takes Maroni and his crew to his base.

As Maroni declares the base and Oz's "Bliss" operation, the crew launches their counterattack triggered by cutting the power to the facility. In the ensuing scuffle, Oz and Maroni fight in an isolated area inside a trolley car. Just as Maroni gets the upper hand, he suffers a fatal heart attack before delivering his coup de gras. With his opponent incapacitated, Oz offers his usual trash talk before doing the double tap with his gun.

"At this point, Sal has tunnel vision," Brown told Variety. "All he wants to do is kill Oz. If he could shoot Oz in the head, and then somebody shot [Sal] in the head, he would die a happy man. He is just is so full of rage and hatred for for Oz Cobb at that point, I don't think anything else exists. I don't think he has any designs to take out Sofia, and he doesn't care at all about the Gigante and Maroni alliance. I don't think he cares a whit about that. He's just using that in order to get to Oz, to kill him."

Brown admits he and Farrell wanted the fight to be as real as possible. "At first, Colin thought, and I thought, 'Well, you know, [Colin's] padded up pretty well,' so Colin said, 'Just go for it.' So I did," he said. "And you know, a couple takes after that, he pulled me aside and said, 'Okay, don't go for it so much' [laughs]. I was really trying to break the club." Before their final confrontation, Oz was trying to bargain the life of his mother for his drug operation, but not before he taunts Sal some more, "He was gonna burn him," he said. "He was gonna burn him slow. He was going to dismember him and burn him. He was definitely going to pour gasoline on him and make him smell his own flesh burning. Just the most painful thing that he could imagine."

As far as the twist of fate that results in Oz winning by default, "I thought it was a great joke," Brown said of his character's demise. "That's in there in order to add another little layer of frustration onto Oz. Oz is a beast like Sal, and he needs to kill in a way that is satisfying for him. And that was very unsatisfying." For more, including how the original plans were for Sal to douse Oz with gasoline and why it didn't work out for Sofia playing her next move in the chess game, you can check out the complete interview. The Penguin airs on Sundays on HBO and streams on Max.

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