Danny DeVito has played schemers, villains and the joyfully unhinged, but even he wasn’t immune to being starstruck. In a new Variety conversation with Colin Farrell, the actor admitted that the real scene-stealer on Tim Burton’s Batman Returns set wasn’t the prosthetics or the penguins… it was a co-star.
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Catwoman: a goddess in Gotham
DeVito, who played Oswald Cobblepot opposite Michael Keaton’s Batman, recalled how Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman left him flustered. “She was a goddess,” he said. “If I knew she was going to be in a scene that day, I got all flushed. Put extra makeup on, ‘Give me another pound of makeup.’”
Farrell, who donned his own layers of latex to play the Penguin three decades later, teased: “Did you brush your teeth that morning?” DeVito laughed: “I lusted after her.”
The line between character and actor blurred in those moments. “I kind of feel like she liked it,” DeVito said, before quickly clarifying that it was Oswald, not Danny, who was doing most of the pining. Still, his honest delight makes it clear Pfeiffer’s feline presence lingered long after the cameras stopped rolling. “Just the pussy I was looking for,” the Penguin famously said in this scheming scene.
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DeVito’s “beating Penguin heart”
The conversation with Farrell wandered from gruelling 18-hour days in the makeup chair to DeVito’s habit of cooking pasta sauce between takes. But it always somehow circled back to his crush, capped with one last admission: “I’d be very content staying in my sewer as long as I could get Catwoman to visit me every once in a while. Be still my beating Penguin heart.”
More than 30 years on, Gotham’s villains have grown darker and more complex, but DeVito’s confession shows some movie memories – and movie crushes – remain timeless.
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