Clancy Brown to play Gotham's biggest gangster in The Penguin

Matt Reeves and Colin Farrell’s upcoming HBO Max show The Penguin is drawing in some serious talent for its return to the crime-caked streets of Gotham City, as Deadline reports that veteran TV and film actor Clancy Brown is joining the cast of the series. Brown—who previously worked with HBO in a starring role on Carnivale, but who has been in, roughly, everything—will play the role of Gotham crime boss Salvatore Maroni.

Which does suggest a few things about what direction The Penguin might take, since, by the time The Batman rolls around, Maroni has been out of the picture in the criminal underworld for some time. (He’s the guy whose bust by the ever-faithful Gotham City Police Department sets up a big chunk of the status quo that Paul Dano’s Riddler spends the entire movie trying to literally blow up.) We don’t get many details about Maroni in the movie proper, but we can now say—with some confidence—that he at least has a deep bass voice and a presence likely to scare the shit out of anyone he’s in a room with. (Both Brown trademarks.) The big question is whether he’ll appear in flashbacks, or whether the events of The Batman set up his potential return to the world of organized comics crime.

This isn’t Brown’s first brush with DC Comics criminal royalty, either; a veteran voice actor, he spent years voicing a definitive Lex Luthor in the DC Animated Universe shows. Here, he’s joining a cast that also includes Farrell, plus fellow new additions Cristin Milioti, Rhenzy Feliz, Michael Kelly, Shohreh Aghdashloo and Deirdre O’Connell.

So far, there’s no word on when The Penguin will arrive on HBO Max; best guesses currently set the series at an early 2024 debut.