Growing up fat, gay prepared me for Penguin -"Gotham" star
Quote:
"With The Penguin specifically, we're very fortunate in that we have about 70 years of mythology to draw upon and do research with and that's what I did when I got the role of The Penguin. That's when I learned he was bullied as a child, he was always treated as an outsider. That was my human link to the character. I learned that and I was like, 'This is something I want to show and root him down to reality.' Growing up overweight and gay in small-town Iowa in the '80s and '90s—it was much different than it is now—and I know exactly what that feels like.