1 week Ago By James Hibberd
HBO’s concluded its first (but almost certainly, not last) season tonight, with defeating his enemies at an enormous cost. The eighth episode saw Cobb return Sofia Falcone ( ) to Arkham Asylum, imprison his stroke-addled mother (Deirdre O’Connell), and, most devastatingly, murder his admiring young mentee, Victor (Rhenzy Feliz). Showrunner , who previously took through , returns to discuss the biggest twists from the ‘s seventh and eighth episodes — and what the future might hold.
*** I’m always looking to see if something can be more emotional or more disturbing because you want to make people feel a certain way. It was important to more deeply understand Oz as a character and what makes him tick. I wanted to pay homage to the previous iterations of the Penguin, and our Oz is not the type of guy to wear a top hat and monocle.
But I thought about the movie , where all these men are wearing the full penguin suit and dancing. I could imagine Oz as a kid watching that and being fascinated and aspiring to that. He loves old movies because of his mother and his drive is so connected to seeking his mother’s love.
Oz is a very impulsive character. In his first scene, he didn’t plan to kill Alberto Falcone that night, right? It was because he was being laughed at and disrespected, and that’s a trigger for him. I don’t think he created a scenario where he would kill his brothers, or let them die.
But it doesn’t matter because it’s just as violent to let your impulsivity control you and then to follow through. The more terrible action is the waiting. He has opportunity after opportunity to say something to tell his mom, “Hey, they’re down there and we should go get them.
” He never does, and that’s what makes him so terrible and so despicable. So I think he knows definitively what he’s doing, but he’s inside with his mom. It’s warm and cozy.
This is everything he wanted. I think it is more the latter. He previously told Sofia a story about how his mom didn’t get out of bed for weeks after his brothers died.
He feels like he’s lost his mother, in a way. He can feel she’s detached, and he has to win back her attention and assure her it’s okay. That it’s actually it’s better now.
It’s easier because she won’t have to feed as many mouths. She would’ve liked to have won the day. I think she had everything at her fingertips, and yet her biggest crutch was her rage and anger towards Oz.
If she was able to let that go, she might’ve had a better and freer life. And I think when she realizes that Oz double crossed her, there’s a minimal amount of respect there for him. She knows on that drive she’s going to die tonight by this man’s hand.
But she does not anticipate at all that the greater death would be bringing her back to Arkham, which is what Oz does to her. I thought about it. I hope some people wanted Sofia to beat Oz because Oz is a villain, and at the end of the day, we should have mixed feelings about the fact that he achieves what he achieves at the cost of all these other people’s lives.
To me, for Sofia, the greater death is going back to Arkham after she experienced freedom and saw the potential of what she could have. To me, this is the more tragic way for things to end for her [Interestingly, on this point]. I wanted her to have a little inkling of hope at the end in the finale, as well, because I think she deserves that much.
That’s a great question and I’m so glad that I got you. When you first meet Victor, you think, “This kid isn’t going to last very long.” And he doesn’t.
In a way, he shouldn’t have survived the pilot. I think Oz kills Victor because Victor has seen him at his most vulnerable and because Victor really cares about him and loves him — and because Victor does view him as family. He learned something from how desperate he was when his mother was threatened.
I think Oz believes that for him to achieve the next level of power, he cannot have weakness. And he views love and affection and family as weak. And losing his humanity, or any form of humanity, that he had.
That was my goal. And my pitch really from day one is this is a “rise to power” story. But it needs to feel like there was a cost to the choices he made and to what he achieved.
And he really is living in his own delusion. He’s chosen to keep his mother alive. He’s dancing with Eve who’s dressed as his mother.
And he’s creating his own narrative and his own world of what is acceptable — which, I think, is unfortunately strikingly relevant to what a lot of people in our world are doing themselves in positions of power. My task was to make a bridge between the and . I love all these characters, and it is been so much fun writing all of them, and it’s such an engaging world.
There are endless stories you could tell in this world. I don’t think anything should continue if there are not better stories to tell, or if you can’t one up yourself creatively. And so I think the only way for something like this to continue is if you feel like you can tell just as rich of a story, if not richer.
*** All of episodes are now streaming on Max. Read ‘s post-finale interview with . THR Newsletters Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day More from The Hollywood Reporter.
