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Colin Farrell Explains the Secret to Finding His New York Accent in ‘The Penguin’: Saying “Gefilte Fish”

"For some reason 'Gefilte fish' became an anchor if the accent was beginning to go out," the Irishman explained of his transformation into gangster Oz Cobb.

Colin Farrell has not only a massive physical transformation in The Penguin — returning to the role of his The Batman villain Oz Cobb — but also a vocal one, switching out his famous Irish accent for that of a New York gangster. “My dialect coach, Jessica Drake, she has a library of thousands of accents from all over the world dating back to the ’30s and ’40s, so when we’re preparing for something we go in — based on where the character’s from, we have a listen to four or five different recordings from around that region, then you narrow the zone into something you think is good energetically, not just the sounds,” the star told The Hollywood Reporter on the carpet. The show is set after the events of the 2022 film The Batman — with Robert Pattinson and Zoë Kravitz — and follows Farrell’s villain as he aims to seize the reins of the crime world in Gotham.

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