Danny DeVito Would Love Another Crack at This Iconic Role
Danny DeVito has had an extraordinarily long career full of hilariously over-the-top roles, ranging from Taxi’s Louis De Palma to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brother Vincent in Twins to Frank Reynolds in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But there’s one other part that he says he’d jump at the chance to play again, if only someone would give him the opportunity.
The role in question? Oswald Cobblepot, otherwise known as the Caped Crusader’s arch-nemesis, the Penguin.
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DeVito tackled the role in Tim Burton’s 1992 sequel, Batman Returns. Unlike the Elephant Man, DeVito’s Penguin relished his otherworldliness. “I am not a human being,” he screams at his lackeys. “I am an animal! Cold-blooded!”
If Batman could return, why not DeVito’s Penguin? “Oh, yeah! I talk to Tim all the time about it,” he told Parade, via Far Out. “I think Oswald is one of the most operatic and greatest parts I’ve ever been offered to do. He’s a tragic bird who could not fly. Come on! Gimme a break! Every actor wants to be able to do that. And if there were ever a chance to do it again, I’d do it.”
DeVito was nearly unrecognizable in the film, looking like a stop-motion creature who escaped from Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. While Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman and her slinky S&M outfit won the most attention, the Jersey Mike’s pitchman got his flowers from critics. “Danny DeVito's Penguin is a funny, explosive little dweeb,” wrote Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Glieberman. “DeVito issues pleas for love in an impassioned rasp, leers with delight as he fires bullets out the end of his umbrella, and even devours a raw fish. He gets off some scurrilous one-liners, too.”
But it was Pfeiffer who got a second chance to play her villainous character, signing on to do a stand-alone Catwoman film with Burton returning to direct after the success of Batman Returns. That sequel descended into development hell, eventually surfacing as 2004’s reviled Catwoman starring poor Halle Berry, who deserved better.
The Penguin has returned as well, but a very different version than the one DeVito played in 1992. Colin Farrell took over the role for The Batman, as well as a stand-alone HBO series that won the actor a Golden Globe. “I love Colin. He’s a good friend of mine. And he’s done great things with his Penguin stuff,” DeVito says. “But that’s a different kind of Penguin. I like going big in a lot of ways, whether it’s Sunny or Taxi.”
But DeVito would stick on the prosthetic beak again, given the chance. After all, said DeVito while hooked up to Vanity Fair’s lie detector, “My Penguin was better.”
