Los Angeles, Sep 18 (IANS): For actor Colin Farrell, it was quite "weird" to transform into the comic book villain The Penguin. The actor hit the red carpet premiere in New York City for his upcoming series centering on the character he first played in 'The Batman'.

He called catching a glimpse of his transformation into Oz Cobb startling, reports 'People' magazine.

“Do you ever see cats looking at themselves in the mirror? How they recoil and they just don't know (it's them)?”, he said, adding, “It was strange".

As per 'People', despite the dramatic costumes and makeup, he added, “It's not like I ever fully lost sense of myself, but it was a very powerful thing to know yourself a certain way for 45 years and to see a reflection. And it also kind of made me aware of how much I identified with how I look".

“As soon as I looked into the mirror and none of me was there, then, I had more of a blank slate than I usually have (going) to work,” he added, before crediting showrunner Lauren LeFranc and her team of writers to fill that “blank slate".

“It was amazing”, he added. “It was really, really powerful. It was something very powerful and very kind of hypnotic to the experience".

The 'Sugar' star credited artist Mike Marino with transforming the actor into the Penguin. “He created this beautiful puppet and I got to animate it, and it was of joy", Farrell said of the artist, who previously worked with Farrell on 'The Batman' in 2022.

The 'True Detective' actor also told 'Variety' last year that he craved more opportunities to play the character after working with Marino and makeup artist Mike Fontaine for only a handful of scenes in 'The Batman'.

He said, “Honest to God, any thought I had about an extended series was to do with Mike Marino’s work. I just knew there was so much to do with it — age it up, age it down".