This story contains spoilers from the season finale of The Penguin.
Rhenzy Feliz knows how to keep a secret. The Penguin star dabbled in the superhero genre on Marvel’s Runaways, but he was never part of a shocker like the one we saw in the season finale. Playing the role of the Penguin’s sidekick, Victor Aguilar, Feliz is a major player in the most gut-wrenching twist that HBO has pulled off since The Last of Us’s finale.
Let me set the scene. When the Batman spin-off series begins, Victor is a wayward teenager looking for any way to escape the slums of Gotham. A chance encounter puts him in the path of the Penguin, who is played by a transformative Colin Farrell. They foster a father-and-son relationship as two outcasts gaming the system of the city’s criminal underbelly. Well, at least until the heartbreaking finale ends in cold-blooded murder. The Penguin simply decides that Victor knows too much about his crimes, so he kills him.
Now that Feliz can finally discuss his demise, he’s ecstatic. “It was gruesome,” the twenty-seven-year-old actor tells me. “By the end, you’ve grown to like Victor a bit—and you need to like Victor so that when he kills me, you hate Oz.”
As much as audiences fell in love with Farrell’s performance over the course of The Penguin, Victor’s death solidified the Batman villain’s cruelty. Hate Oz? That seemed impossible just a week ago. Gotham’s very own Tony Soprano was the primary reason to turn on your television for the past two months. Still, it was The Penguin’s job to sell him as a formidable villain before his reemergence in The Batman Part II, which will hit theaters in 2026.
Farrell’s character suffocates Feliz’s in the final scene, meaning that the actor had no idea what the moment looked like until he watched the finished edit. “I was in his gut, looking at the ground,” he says. “But what Colin was doing…I was in awe. That face he’s making at the end, you can see what he’s going through. I found it so cold and painful.”
With The Penguin’s finale finally out in the world, Feliz shares what it was like to watch the explosive episode for the first time, the pressures of playing a character with a stutter, and the tunes that got him through the show’s most stressful scenes.
ESQUIRE: Obviously, this is the end of the road for Victor. But it’s so heartbreaking! Were you satisfied with how his story ended?
RHENZY FELIZ: Yeah, by the time I got to the end I was satisfied, but I always expected that to be the end. That was always the story to me, the natural ending. So I never even thought about more, because I knew where we were headed. For what we wanted to do, to serve the story, it was necessary for the audience to see [the Penguin] as irredeemable.
I loved when Oz picks up your driver’s license and confirms that you’re just Victor Aguilar. For everyone theorizing at home, you’re not some secret Batman character. It really sold the moment for me.
Yeah, and what a brutal moment that is, too. The whole show, Oz is telling him [imitating Colin Farrell’s Penguin], “They’re going to remember us, kid. They’re going to remember our names. You can be somebody.” For him to take out my license and just leave me as this John Doe of a body in the river, that no one will ever know who I was…it’s brutal.
Fantastic Oz Cobb impression, by the way. I can’t stop quoting him myself, even around the office. Has Colin heard it?
No, not in front of Colin. [Laughs.] I keep that to myself. But when I’m around my friends and we’re watching the show, it’s fun to put on the voice.
You seem to have a knack for voice work. One of the things that impresses me the most about your performance is the stutter.
Definitely. When I first got the audition, [the script] didn’t mention it. I came back to meet the director, Craig [Zobel], and he sprung it on me in the middle of the audition. I did a couple scenes without it, and then he said, “Why don’t you just try it?” As an actor, you feel like you can’t say no. I was just like, “Yeah, sure, I’ll give it a shot!” It must’ve been decent enough, because they wanted me to meet Colin. I hired my own dialect coach in between and I stayed in the stutter for a couple of days. I got the call later that they wanted me to come shoot. They hired a fluency consultant, Marc Winski, and he was incredibly helpful.
I wanted it to feel genuine to me. So we spent a lot of time going out in public with it, calling people on the phone, and really figuring out not as much the technical aspects of the stutter but more the mental and emotional side. Mark also has a stutter, so that was invaluable. I was concerned about the entire community of people who live with this every day. If I came in as someone who doesn’t have [a stutter] and didn’t take it seriously enough—or they felt like I was making fun of it—I was very afraid of the idea that they would reject me. Thankfully, everyone’s been incredibly kind. It was a relief.
I loved the scene that you have with Colin in episode 3, when you’re at a fancy lunch and he defends you from the waiter interrupting you while you stutter.
It was one of my favorite scenes to shoot. It’s really the first time you get to hear Victor speak. Before then, it’s only a sentence here and there, but then he actually talks about himself a little bit. He opens up and Oz listens to him. That day was beautiful. Colin came up to me after we were done and patted me on the face. He didn’t even say anything, but I could feel the energy was like, “That was nice. We’re doing a good job.” He and I knew that was an important scene for Victor, for his development with Oz, and as a character in front in the eyes of the audience.
It was probably easy for Colin to get in and out of his character, since he had to literally put on or take off a mountain of prosthetics. But was there anything you would do to get into the mindset of Victor before shooting?
I used music a lot. I made a playlist called “Vic.” There’s one song by Eminem called “8 Mile,” and I used that the entire last half of the season. If anyone listens to “8 Mile,” they’ll see.
“8 Mile” checks out.
I also have “Flight from the City” by Jóhann Jóhannsson. And I have the Howl’s Moving Castle soundtrack on here, too.
That feels like the opposite vibe of The Penguin. Was that just to mellow out after a really intense scene? Like a palate cleanser?
Exactly. I would use Howl’s at the beginning of every day just to go to a neutral place. It’s meditative. Calming. But then, by the time I was in the makeup chair with my lines in my hands, then I’m listening to the Victor music.
Was it hard to play a character who continuously makes bad choices?
The only time I was mad at Victor was when he would mess up the mission. I did my best to try to understand where he’s coming from. In his heart, he’s good. He doesn’t want to be doing any of these things, but he does them in spite of himself because he wants to be useful to Oz. He finds a love for Oz and he doesn’t want to let Oz down. It’s more out of necessity.
We all have choices to make—and we have a lot more control of our destiny than we feel. Victor, Oz, Sophia, even Francis—none of them are in a good position by the end of the show. When Victor kills Squid, that’s him thinking, I can’t let him hurt Oz and Francis, because they’re my new family.
I doubt Victor could show up in any potential Bat-verse projects from here on out, but from what I’ve read in your interviews, you seem like a guy who would rather move on to something new anyway.
Yeah, you’re definitely right that I am looking forward to the next thing. I just want to play even more interesting characters and be a part of as many exciting projects that I can. It’s not necessarily a role that I’m looking forward to, or a specific character that I want to play, but there is one in the back of my mind that I’ll want to play once I get a little older. I’ve always loved Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Hamilton is one of my favorite pieces of art ever made. I would love to get to do that at some point—just got to get my singing lessons up to par.
You were in Encanto. Seems like you’ve got an in with Lin-Manuel already.
Yeah. [Laughs.] I don’t know what it is about me. I just need to be better if I want to be able to perform that musical. That’s something that I’ve always looked forward to down the line.
