Anyone who watched the fourth episode of HBO’s currently running comic-book adaptation The Penguin will know that John Turturro isn’t in it. Of course, Turturro isn’t in any of the other episodes of the show either—or thousands of other episodes of television produced every year, a real shame when you think about it—but “Cent’anni” was notable because a character originated by Turturro was in it: Carmine Falcone, the mob boss from 2022’s The Batman. In the film, Turturro radiated quiet menace as the character sat, spider-like, at the heart of Gotham City’s web of corruption; in the TV series, we instead got Mark Strong radiating a strong confusion about why he was sitting around in a Spirit Halloween John Turturro costume, sleepwalking his way through a big load of backstory and exposition.
There’s been a fair amount of speculation about why Turturro—who’s made a strong showing in TV in recent years, including a notable turn in Severance—hadn’t deigned to show up and film the three or four scenes that Carmine appears in in The Penguin. Speculation is no longer required, however, as Turturro addressed the question in a recent Variety interview. And the answers are actually a bit more interesting than the scheduling conflicts everyone assumed; Turturro didn’t just bow out of reprising the role for the show, he actively shot it down.
“I did what I wanted to with the role,” the actor notes of his time as Carmine Falcone. “In the show, there was a lot of violence towards women, and that’s not my thing.” Which is a) fair, but also b) fascinating, in so far as The Batman very explicitly depicts Carmine as a murderer of women (albeit in off-screen ways that fuels Catwoman’s whole arc in the film). We haven’t seen scripts, of course, but The Penguin keeps Carmine’s violence similarly away from the cameras: We watch him coldly manipulate and gaslight his daughter (Cristin Milioti’s Sofia), and he engineers horrible abuses against her. But while we can joke about Strong’s performance, the character as it appears in the series does feel baseline very much like the one from the film, a man who projects stillness and evil while his minions go do awful things in the world.
The Penguin talk was just part of a longer interview, in which Turturro also suggested that Severance’s second season would likely be his last with the Apple series. “I didn’t like being in that office—the light there drove me insane,” Turturro says. “I did my second go round, but I feel like I’ve had a full meal.”
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