Who knew The Penguin owes a debt of gratitude to Popeye Doyle?
As production designer Kalina Ivanov tells Gold Derby, Matt Reeves, the director of 2022’s The Batman and an executive producer on The Penguin, informed her that the “inspiration” for his vision of Gotham City was The French Connection, William Friedkin‘s 1971 neo-noir crime thriller starring Gene Hackman as the unorthodox cop Doyle, which won five Oscars, including Best Picture. “That is something I held very dear in my heart,” Ivanov says, “because I really wanted to make a new version of The French Connection.” See exclusive sketches, concept art, and set photos from The Penguin in our gallery above.
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Colin Farrell reprises his villainous role of Oswald “Oz” Cobb/the Penguin in the HBO limited series, after having a supporting role in The Batman. Following the events of that motion picture, The Penguin chronicles the character’s rise to power in Gotham’s criminal underworld, which was filmed in and around New York City. “It’s rare to meet a producer and actor that will actually come and talk to you and have a real design meeting,” Ivanov says about Farrell. “I showed him all the designs, and particularly his apartment, and he was instrumental in the design of the whole show.”
Courtesy of Kalina Ivanov/HBO Max – Credit: Courtesy of Kalina Ivanov/HBO Max
Courtesy of Kalina Ivanov/HBO Max
While Lauren LeFranc was the showrunner, producer, and writer of the TV spin-off, Reeves was still “involved,” Ivanov explains. “We had some creative meetings, and occasionally, we would send him materials, and he was very aware of everything we were doing. He was staying behind the scenes, but he was communicative with Lauren in the script area.”
LeFranc is “one of the nicest people on the planet,” claims the Emmy-winning production designer for Grey Gardens (2009). “I got to know her through this experience, and I can say that she is perhaps the best showrunner I’ve ever had. That doesn’t come lightly, because I’ve had some good ones, but she’s very communicative and very thoughtful. I just loved working with her.”
Growing up in Bulgaria, Ivanov was a “theater kid” who wanted to be an actress, until she realized “that was a disaster,” so she set her sights on designing. “I suspect that was because my uncle was an architect,” she reveals. “I studied theater, and then we escaped from Bulgaria. I ended up at NYU as an undergraduate in a graduate program, if you can imagine that. But it was a very, very good education.”
Courtesy of Kalina Ivanov/HBO Max – Credit: Courtesy of Kalina Ivanov/HBO Max
Courtesy of Kalina Ivanov/HBO Max
One of Ivanov’s favorite locations in The Penguin is the Falcone mansion, which is on Long Island. “It’s one of The Great Gatsby mansions, but it wasn’t on the Sound, it was more in inland,” she recalls. “The owners were incredibly generous with us. They made time for us to be able to film. They did not bat an eye when we offered to enhance the exterior with our fountain. As a matter of fact, they thought it was a good idea to have a fountain!”
For the interior of the mansion, she “enhanced it quite substantially” after being influenced by an Italian villa on Lake Como. “What I liked about that villa was the darker colors, and so I thought it would be good to have a lot of black, a lot of gold, but sparingly, not overwhelmingly,” she details. “The rest of it was done in Venetian plaster. We had a lot of textures, and the amazing pre-Renaissance murals were everywhere.”
The trolley depot set was built inside Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx, which Ivanov states is the “biggest one in New York, and for 15 years nobody could shoot there.” She continues on, “I loved the lobby that existed, and I wanted it to be a working man’s cathedral. Going with Matt’s theme of The French Connection being always under subways and arches, I went with that idea of arches for the trolley depot. The columns that we put in mimicked the detail from the lobby, so the relationship between the location and the set was perfect.”
Courtesy of Kalina Ivanov/HBO Max – Credit: Courtesy of Kalina Ivanov/HBO Max
Courtesy of Kalina Ivanov/HBO Max
She divulges, “The trolley cars were modern, so we retrofitted them and made them look like they’ve been there since 1957, because that’s when we discovered the last trolley left the station. They were brought in, and the tunnel was built around the cars, in a sense.”
The Penguin’s “journey” was important to Ivanov and LeFranc. As the artisan declares, “At the beginning, he lives on the third story of the abandoned hotel, and at the end he will graduate to the penthouse, to give him an arc of progression. The apartment at the beginning was a jeweler’s repair shop, and I had done a little bit of research about that. And so the Penguin lived in a room that used to be the vault, basically.”
Ivanov designed the entire abandoned hotel “through visual effects,” and planned to create the sets for it, but “our budget was not able to support that.” Instead, the team found a real art deco building in downtown NYC with a floor that was under renovation, which she saw as a “completely blank slate.” She remembers, “That worked well for us, because I was able to bring the columns, the floor, and the frescoes, which this time were the hounds of Zeus. We were able to create everything, from the chandeliers to every single piece of detail. In a way, it was a stage. But it was on the 30th floor of a real building.”
Courtesy of Kalina Ivanov/HBO Max – Credit: Courtesy of Kalina Ivanov/HBO Max
Courtesy of Kalina Ivanov/HBO Max
Monroe’s jazz club is one of Ivanov’s favorite sets from The Penguin, as budget issues caused her to improvise on the fly. “We ended up with a location that had Hieronymus Bosch murals that were absolutely not appropriate for our movie,” she recalls. “So, as I was wondering how I could handle that, a light bulb went off in my head, and I said, ‘OK, we cover the murals.’ And so we built in the columns, the booths themselves, the intricate work behind them, and the blue curtain, which hid the murals, and then we put our own paintings in front of that.”
The designer also “built this chandelier, and we put it up from the beginning, and then we dropped it in the end, and the scene is so good with the dropped chandelier.” Ivanov adds, “It was so hard to come up with a solution, and yet I was able to find a solution and make and use the set that I had already planned on building.”
All episodes of The Penguin are streaming now on Max. The limited series is eligible at the 2025 Emmys, and Ivanov says a nomination “would mean the world to me.”
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Launch Gallery: ‘The Penguin’ exclusive sketches, concept art, and set photos from production designer Kalina Ivanov
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