At this recent New York Comic Con, I and a few other reporters had the opportunity to sit down and talk with the cast of The Penguin. Each of them were wonderfully gracious and answered our questions to give more insight into what went into making the show. Below is our conversation with Rhenzy Feliz, who plays Victor Aguilar. You can see our coverage of the public panel here, as well as our interview with Cristin Milioti, who plays Sophia Falcone, showrunner Lauren LeFranc. and Rhenzy Feliz, who plays Victor Aguilar.

This is a non-Batman Batman show, a genre show that doesn't have the typical tropes. How do you explain that to people who ask you what you're working on, and how do you feel about it personally?

I feel like this show is an answer to the question "what could you possibly make that would honor that performance of Colin's and that work of [makeup artist] Mike Marino's in The Batman? That piece of art that they made, that character, it's just so awesome to me. I feel like this show is just like if you said "what could possibly honor that". This is a huge weed that grew out of an enormous number of great artists all saying "we'll make a world that this person could live in. We'll make a world that could be the origin story of this person. We'll make a world that keeps up with the brilliance of that one thing", which was just designing that prosthetic. It's just the most amazing beautiful thing, and his performance inside of it is so amazing. That's the answer that I always have. It's just it all has to do with like, did you see that performance? Let's make eight hours about that.

In terms of playing Oz's Mom, what was the process of developing that character and portraying that character, especially with the character that is dealing with lapses of memory. What were the challenges with that? And what was the fun and also playing the mother of Oz?

The Dementia stuff is unfortunately close to my heart. My dad I think probably had Lewy Body Dementia, although it's commonly misdiagnosed as either Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. It's very common thing, but when I look back, having learned all this stuff about what Lewy Bodies is, I realized my dad had that. So unfortunately, I knew the feeling of having spent years with him with that. I feel like that work, the research on it, the watching people who have it. I was lucky enough to find a woman who let me go to PT sessions with clients of hers who had it. I was able to be with them and had her really train me up in exactly the gait and exactly the symptoms.

I had some amazing YouTube videos that I found where people who have that in their family will be like, "all right, I'm just gonna make 50 hours of YouTube video me and my mom hanging out for people that are in this position who are trying to figure out what to do and how to live with it". There's a generosity of spirit that happens on YouTube about these kinds of very isolating diseases.

That work was very depressing and very hard to do. Every time that we had a little break, we had a six month break at one point [during the writer's strike] as you know, when it was time to go back in I would be like "you gotta just go back in. You gotta watch all your tapes. You got to read all your material again. You gotta think about your dad again. You gotta look at all your photos. You got to do all that stuff again" and I would just be like no, because it's so sad. It's so hard to think about and it makes you so depressed, and it makes me think about death.

I would sort of dread it, and then I would do it, and then I would find these delightful things to look at. They were hilarious and wonderful about the things people do and say. Then when we got to work, it was always fun. It was always really, really fun. When we were actually shooting there were hard, scary ones, and Colin would always laugh at me because I would be the first one to be like, "are we done? Do you have enough? Can we stop?" Because some of the stuff we had to do was so harsh and emotionally wrenching. I was the one that's like, "can we go home yet, mom?" But I was also extremely happy on that set. The set was always pleasurable, really, really pleasurable, but that part of the homework was something I sort of dreaded and would walk into and just make the world feel very gray to me.

The work on the dialect was really fun. Really technically challenging. He and his dialect coach, "he" being Colin and his dialect coach Jessica Drake was a genius, had really built that for The Batman, and even though it's not exotic, you've heard it before and you'll hear it again, it was very specific to his voice. The neighborhood that they were creating their little side of what would it be like to be from Crown Point in Gotham. So they had built this dialect that was very specific, and that was very technical work. I had to just really learn that dialect, drill, have all these crazy sheets with all this phonetic writing on it, and learn that, which was kind of fun. So, I had a lot of outside in things I had to do for homework, some of which were just really technical things, and some of which were sad, but that set was never sad, that set was always like, let's go.

You talked about, in the panel, about how your character views Oz as almost a weapon. She's arming him. How much of her influence on him is out of a selfless desire to help him, and how much of it is viewing him as an extension of herself and her own power?

He is an extension of herself and her own power. There's no other way to perceive it, I don't know what you mean, haha. I actually sort of weirdly don't. I feel like they're both true, but I think that's it. The separation is a little dicey between them. No, she doesn't want to help him. Helping him is helping her; they're the same. I don't think she sees that separately at all, which is probably the nut of the problem, right?

So is she like one of those dance moms, but with crime?

Yes! She is! Exactly. I'm taking that one. The next time you watch a round table it'll be like "I'm like a dance mom but with crime". No, it's true. A dance mom with like moidah. That's great.

You'll see. It's not quite as simple as just she's a mean lady who's raising this boy. She's actually the nicest person on the whole show, it turns out, because anybody else would have done a lot worse. When you find out everything, you're like, "oh, she was actually being a great mom compared to what she could have been, considering".

The story is so great that way, because it really does turn it upside down at a certain point. You'll think it's the trope about The Sopranos, and then you'll find out it's another trope, a new trope. Truly twisted, it's so sad, it's so sad.

Did you use your theater experience when working on the show?

I'm sure I do. I feel like one of the challenges of this show was that I'm so used to thinking that, as a theater actor, you're supposed to keep bringing everything down and down and down and down, "that's too theatrical". One of the challenges of this show was to have the courage to be like, "actually, this is a very theatrical show". I feel like the Francis-Oz stuff, it's all very lived in, and it's not terribly theatrical, but the work to do it was very theater work. Learning a dialect and then showing up and having it be exact, and having to repeat those exact sounds every time, that's like theater, training work. But the courage to kind of be "well, no, we're in an operatic story". The feeling in my body of being in a play and the feeling of doing this were very familiar, very much the same. Sometimes with film if I feel like almost nothing happened, that's probably good. With this it never felt like almost nothing happened. It felt like a lot happened.

Five Boroughs, New York - you know, Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan - which Borough would you say that Francis and Oz belong in most?

Well they're from, probably, I would say somewhere in the Bronx, and I think now he's got her in the outskirts of Queens.

What did your dialect coach say? Did they ever nail them down?

It's sort of like an old timey movie dialect in some ways, but I think she would be able to say. She would be like "it's this street and not that street". I wouldn't be able to say, but I would say that she would know. She would be like, "no, no, no, no. See the Irish were right there and the Italians are right there, and this is right here". So it's very much a combination of that Irish-Italian. Is it the 30s, is it the 50s? It's really specific and they worked their asses off on it, and then I was just like, how do I say these words, you guys?

Just today, when I was watching and he was like, "the woild" and I can remember the first time that I had to say "woild" and I was like really? Truly? They're like, yep, you gotta say "woild". Then once I was with him and he was talking like that, I was like, "okay, we do talk like this", but at first it felt like "really? I'm gonna get away with this on TV?"

Stay tuned for more Batman News coverage of NYCC, including interviews, news, and panels.