COM Alum Earns Emmy Nomination for Helming the Finale of The Penguin
Colin Farrell stars as Oz Cobb—aka the Penguin—in the finale of HBO Max’s The Penguin, A Great or Little Thing, directed by Jennifer Getzinger (COM’90). Photo by Macall Polay/HBO
COM Alum Earns Emmy Nomination for Helming the Finale of The Penguin
Jennifer Getzinger is up for Outstanding Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie at Sunday night’s ceremony
Jennifer Getzinger has directed some of television’s most acclaimed episodes during the last two decades—and this Sunday, the Boston University alum could add an Emmy Award to her impressive résumé. Getzinger is nominated for Outstanding Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for helming the finale of HBO Max’s The Penguin, A Great or Little Thing.
Set in the Batman universe, The Penguin, starring Colin Farrell as Oz Cobb—aka the Penguin—chronicles his rise to power in seedy Gotham.
“It’s really exciting,” Getzinger (COM’90) says of the nomination—her first. “It’s unexpected in a lot of ways. I also received a Directors Guild of America nomination [along with two other directors from The Penguin], but I was definitely not expecting the Emmy as well. It’s really great.” (Over the course of her career, Getzinger has earned four Directors Guild nominations, along with a BAFTA nomination.)
After studying broadcasting and film at BU, Getzinger began her career as a script supervisor on films, including Requiem for a Dream and The Devil Wears Prada, as well as television series such as The Sopranos, Sex & the City, and Desperate Housewives. She initially joined the Emmy-winning Mad Men as a script supervisor, going on to direct 10 episodes. Among them, “The Suitcase” (season four)—widely considered one of the series’ best—was ranked #2 on The Ringer’s 100 Best Episodes of the Century. In that episode, Peggy (Elizabeth Moss) and her boss, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), pull an all-nighter to create a last-minute ad campaign for a suitcase company and find a newfound respect for each other.
Bostonia spoke with Getzinger about her career, her research before she begins shooting, and some of her favorite moments from The Penguin.
Q&A
with Jennifer Getzinger
Bostonia: When you were at BU, did you know you wanted to pursue a career in directing? What was your initial plan?
Getzinger: When I first went to BU, I was really interested in writing and screenwriting. I was signing up late for classes because I had transferred to BU, and couldn’t get into the writing class. I knew I wanted to do some production as well, so I did the production class, and then I just took some film study classes. After the first semester, I realized directing was the way I wanted to go. I took a class with Ray Carney [a College Communication professor of film], and so much of what I learned there, like different ways of telling stories visually and emotionally, inspired me to want to be a director.
Bostonia: You started in the business as a script supervisor, right? How did that prepare you for directing?
Getzinger: When I first came to Los Angeles after graduating, I arrived with a group of students from BU, and everyone was scrambling to get into the business. I worked any job I could, assisting producers, assisting in postproduction, and doing different things. And a lot of people were talking to me about script supervising, because I was always mentioning directing and wanting to be on set, and so luckily, I got in with a production company that allowed me to be the second unit script supervisor on some things. And I also worked as the assistant because it was a small production company.
That can often be a great way to start, because sometimes you get to wear a lot of hats when you work for a smaller company. Script supervising really suited my slightly Type A personality of being someone who is always checking things very meticulously, making sure continuity is correct, everyone is saying their lines correctly. But also in the sense of being able to see, from an editorial standpoint, how everything is going to go together, and talking with the director constantly. That was really an incredible education. I ended up doing that for a long time, first in indie movies and then in television.
Bostonia: What brought you to Mad Men?
Getzinger: I was working on Sex and the City in New York. I was the script supervisor on that for three seasons and met a lot of incredible people in television at that time. It was really this “golden age,” where television was being taken more seriously for the first time, and I worked with the top TV directors and got to shadow them as their script supervisor.
So that was an incredible education, and Mad Men kind of came out of that Sex and the City and Sopranos camp, because [Mad Men creator and showrunner] Matthew Weiner was writing for The Sopranos. A lot of the base crew who worked with him came from there, and some of them from Sex and the City, including me.
Bostonia: What are the challenges of dropping into a well-established show that already has a look and feel?
It can be a little bit tricky. You have to put your ego aside a little in television and really make it about telling the story in the best way you possibly can. I always trust that my perspective and vision will come through without me leading with my ego and saying, “I need to put my mark on this.” I’m just saying, “I think this is the best way we can tell this story or the best way we can bring this moment to light.” And I hope that that’s really sort of where my styles come from.
I mean, people have talked to me about my style, and I’m like, “I don’t actually try to have a style, I really just try to do what I think feels right.” It changes the longer I’ve been doing this. And with the times, there are different styles that get into the zeitgeist of television. I definitely try things, and cinematographers will have different ideas, and sometimes I’ll think, oh, I really loved that, maybe I’ll use that same kind of thing over here.
It’s always an evolving thing, and what I try to do is have it always come from the work itself and really be inspired by “What is the story I’m telling here?”
Bostonia: Can you talk specifically about directing your Emmy-nominated episode of The Penguin?
Going into The Penguin was funny. I think I had the same reaction that a lot of people did, which was a little bit of hesitation: “What’s the story about the Penguin going to be?” And it felt like, “Do I fit in the comic book world? I’m not sure.”
Then, in reading the scripts, I was completely blown away. I realized that this was a character study; it is really a mob story, an origin story. In a way, this man doesn’t even have to be the Penguin. It’s really just the story of his rise, as twisted as it is. I saw it as a grounded human story. I wasn’t trying to tell a comic book tale. I certainly watched some of Matt Reeves’ The Batman [The Penguin is a spin-off of the 2022 movie] to get a feel for just what that Gotham feels like, and that was really helpful. The movie definitely inspired me.
Because I did the finale, I watched a bit of what they had done earlier in the season. Lauren LeFranc, The Penguin’s showrunner, was so open and really just wanted to keep talking about the world-building of Gotham, the deep character explorations, creating mood, giving a lot of room for these emotional moments, especially in the finale, where there were so many. There were no rules. She was very open.
The Penguin has such an interesting tone because it’s this very grounded, gritty, Mafia, inner-city story that’s slightly elevated.
Bostonia: Were there any specific sequences or scenes in that episode that were especially challenging to direct?
There is a scene where Sophia interrogates Oz and his mother, and he’s tied to a chair inside the nightclub. And that was day one and two of shooting for me. I think the showrunner said it was an 11-page scene. It was definitely challenging, because it’s something where Colin is really taped to the chair, because he really needed to struggle. Everyone kept saying, “Oh, we have this fake duct tape we can use.” But he couldn’t use fake duct tape because he couldn’t jump around and really fight if it was just going to rip off. So every time, we would really tape him in there, and he’d tell us to make it stronger. But that meant he was sitting there, taped to the chair, in this suit, in this prosthetic makeup.
The thing about that makeup is that it’s so incredible—I’ve never seen anything like it. But it was hot, and [Colin] would normally step away between each setup and go to an air-conditioned tent just to try to bring his body temperature down. But in this instance, he couldn’t do that. And so that was really challenging, because we were trying to move quickly and move around him. It was like this very choreographed moment where Sophia weaves her way around the two of them, really trying to get them to admit these awful truths. A scene like that just requires a lot of coverage and a lot of different moving pieces. We wanted the camera to move in the same way she was moving and capture some pieces that could play together. This kind of choreography always takes a little bit more time, too. We really jumped into the deep end, starting with that sequence.
Bostonia: What are you working on next?
I just finished directing two episodes of Ahsoka, a Star Wars show on Disney+. I directed an episode in the first season, and then I directed episodes two and three for the upcoming second season.
Bostonia: Do you feel yourself gravitating now more towards comic book and sci-fi shows?
You know, I definitely am much more comfortable in these bigger “genre worlds” than I ever thought I would be. When I started [I thought] I wanted to make very intense movies with people talking about their inner thoughts, and the longer I’ve done this, the more I’ve come to realize that you can use these genres and classic characters, certain plots, to tell similar stories.
There are ways to really still talk about the human condition, to talk about what makes us survive through life in a way that can also be entertaining. I’ve grown to appreciate that. The challenge of it is great, too. There are a lot of visual effects, there are a lot of different ways that you do certain things, so there is always a learning curve in doing it which I really enjoy.
The 2025 Primetime Emmy Awards will be broadcast live on CBS on Sunday, September 14, starting at 8 pm ET.
Jennifer Getzinger: The big scene of the episode is the scene where [Oz] kills Victor.
We had a few very emotional scenes in this episode. We have the scene where Oz finds his mother in a vegetative state, and that was really a big scene and really an emotional moment for Colin, obviously. We really worked on the blocking of it, and we actually did it where the whole first shot, when he comes in and runs around the room and is looking at different things and then eventually realizes what’s going on, ends up becoming his close-up. That way he could really play it in a very authentic way and play it all the way through, which was so fantastic for him.
A lot of directing is protecting what the actor needs in the moment. So that was really great.
The other big emotional scene was the final scene with Oz and Victor. And that scene was something that everyone was a bit nervous about. It was something we wanted to keep under wraps, because of course, what happens there is hopefully entirely unexpected to the audience. It really shows you who this man, Oz, is at his core. In a way, we felt like you kind of forget it a little bit throughout the season, you get seduced by him, right? You’re rooting for him, so that was the scene where you had to say, “No, wait, this man is truly a monster at his core.” So it was a big turning-point scene. We kept discussing the location, and I pitched that I wanted it to be this beautiful, serene spot by the river. It was originally written just to be sort of like a junky, trashy riverbank area, and I said, “Well, what if it’s the opposite of that? What if it’s more like that classic shot from Woody Allen’s Manhattan, where you just see this gorgeous tree and river?” Both the showrunner and Colin really liked the idea.
We location-scouted and found it. We were there that night, and it was an odd, quiet, still, eerie scene. Both Colin and Renzi Feliz [who plays Victor] were a little nervous about it. We were discussing when we would get to the moment, but we kept avoiding talking about the actual moment.
I always think that’s interesting—that often the biggest moment [of a scene or show] is something you can’t overtalk. It’s too instinctual for people.
We shot from behind. On the day of the shoot I was walking around and realized that if you looked behind them, the river was so high at a certain angle that it almost looked like they were going under the water, and that felt reminiscent of the flood [of Gotham City]. That happened in the very beginning, and it was what killed Victor’s family.
But then, getting to the moment where Oz actually strangles Victor, it was just so intense for everyone. We were so quiet, and the moment that Colin looked up after he dropped him down just sent chills through us. I think that was take one—it was like we watched him completely transform into this horrible monster.
I think we only did two takes of the scene. I mean, Colin is very much that kind of actor. He’ll rehearse it, he’ll walk through it, but then he wants to just do it. He dives right in.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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