Springboard: ‘Gotham’ Breakout Robin Lord Taylor on His ‘Life-Changing’ Role
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Before Robin Lord Taylor landed the coveted role of Oswald Cobblepot, aka the man who will later becomes the Penguin, on the hit freshman FOX drama “Gotham,” he was best known for one of two things: playing the short-lived Sam on “The Walking Dead” or co-creating the web series that launched Billy Eichner’s “Billy on the Street.” While both could be listed as notable break-ins for any young working actor, things have turned around even quicker for the blonde-haired Iowa native.
Before his first audition, Taylor was tipped off by his agent that the fake scene he was reading was actually for “Gotham,” the hotly-anticipated cops-and-criminals series chronicling Batman’s city before the caped crusader came into play. Sticking to his guns, Taylor read the scene just as he’d prepared it, and did so again when he was flown to Los Angeles for a callback in front of the show’s creators.
Obviously, it worked out for him. What’s so remarkable, though, is even after the blind audition and with full knowledge of who he was portraying, Taylor’s performance hasn’t fallen back on any of the comic book gimmicks associated with the Penguin — he’s created a version of the umbrella-wielding madman unique to the populated world from which he came. There have been many portrayals of Oswald Cobblepot before his, but Taylor’s interpretation is both painfully calculated, wildly desperate and aptly cold. While he might be discovering the Penguin along with the audience, they can see that Taylor knows him inside and out already.
Indiewire spoke with the strong Golden Globes contender about how he’s enlivened Oswald in “Gotham,” why his background in comedy has helped him with drama, getting Twitter praise from Patton Oswalt and what’s changed in his life since landing the role (though he’s just happy to have a ride to work).
Another thing about doing comedy […] is you learn how precise a joke has to be in order to get the maximum amount of laughs. If your timing is one millisecond off, or if you hit some word harder than another word, it can throw off the entire thing. So the precision of the language was something I learned. You would never learn that unless you were doing a live comedy show. That’s something I bring to everything I do now.
