By Variety | Created at 2024-10-29 21:23:01 | Updated at 2024-10-30 01:28:31
6 hours ago
He looks ahead, his dark eyebrows overshadowing his dark eyes. One of his several gold teeth gleams in the dim light.
This is how Ren Leach describes Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell), also known as the iconic Batman villain The Penguin, in Max’s limited series of the same name.
“You almost get chills, like really envisioning the scene as we’re first introduced to this character,” says Naomi Waibel, SVP, global product management at Warner Bros. Discovery.
The show, itself a spinoff of Matt Reeves’ “The Batman,” features audio descriptions created by a team of nearly all-blind professionals. The streamer partnered with post-production company IDC for the project, leveraging personal insights from the team’s members to ensure the narration of the series was tailored to the needs of blind and low-vision audiences. Leach’s own experience as a blind voice artist informed his creative process in providing fans with key details such as character micro-expressions and visual elements with symbolic narrative meaning.
“‘The Penguin’s’ audio description project was a first-of-its-kind approach,” says Waibel. “This crew that came together really brought a level of expertise that I think helped take this to a whole new level…they describe things in a way that’s really cinematic and does right by the storytelling.”
Leach credited audio description writers Dakota Green and Liz Gutman for crafting scripts with intricate details. He said in watching the series with his wife, who is sighted, he’s been told of how the production design features stylistic comic book aesthetics depicting light gleaming off the bumper of a car or reflected in a puddle on a wet street.
“The contextual details they add into scenes give it so much more texture,” Leach says. “For example, when we’re talking about Penguin’s teeth gleaming in the light…the accentuation, the detail that the show is already giving the visual audience is picked up by our writers and added in such a way.”
Leach explains although the Penguin is a well-known antagonist in the Batman universe, portraying Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) was a challenge because of her position as a newer character.
“The evolution of Sofia’s character from the spoiled, young aristocrat is really multi-layered,” Leach says. “All of the things that go into breaking her character down and revealing, peeling away the character that she would become for the rest of the series…it’s a fun dichotomy to go through a story.”
Leach says he used a high register in his voice to capture the innocent portrayal of Sofia prior to her time being incarcerated. He describes how, later in the series, her character physically peels away the layers on the wall of her prison cell as a metaphor for how she’s peeling away the layers of her own psyche.
“[Sofia] snaps when she finds out that she isn’t going to be released. That’s when things get a little darker,” Leach says. “She becomes the killer that everybody thinks she is so she can survive.”
One note of specificity Leach highlights is the reveal of Sofia’s scar on her shoulder in Episode 4. This detail contrasts with her unscarred shoulder in a flashback earlier in the same episode, something Leach underscores in his voice performance to imbue subtext and meaning into the character’s harrowing experiences at Arkham Asylum.
“The scar is the embodiment of Sofia’s transition,” Leach says. “She’s wearing the dress that is displaying — it’s not revealing, it’s displaying — the scar. She has her power and her truth when she displays the scar.”
Leach, when he describes Oz Cobb, creates something sensory and tangible — a vivid portrait for all fans that evolves “The Penguin” from a series into an experience. And he finds power and truth of his own.
