Danny DeVito confesses he 'lusted after' Michelle Pfeiffer on 'Batman Returns'

Los Angeles, June 3 (IANS) Hollywood star Danny DeVito recently got candid about former co-star Michelle Pfeiffer. He confessed that he “lusted” after Pfeiffer while the two were filming 1992’s Tim Burton-directed ‘Batman Returns’.

DeVito played the antagonist Penguin opposite Pfeiffer’s Catwoman and Michael Keaton’s Batman, reports ‘People’ magazine.

He sat down for a conversation with Colin Farrell for Variety’s Actors on Actors series. He said, “She was a goddess. If I knew she was going to be in a scene that day”.

As per ‘People’, Farrell, 49, quipped, “Did you brush your teeth that morning?”

“I got all flushed”, the senior actor responded. ‘It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ star then said, “Put extra makeup on, ‘Give me another pound of makeup’. It was very difficult”.

Pfeiffer, now 67, was “just so wonderful. And I lusted after her”, DeVito added. He then agreed with Farrell that it was his character, Oswald Cobblepot, the Penguin, who was doing the lusting. “I kind of feel like she liked it. She liked Oswald”, DeVito said.

In Batman Returns, Selina Kyle, the Catwoman, rejects Oswald’s advances. In 2021, however, DeVito wrote a short story in which the two characters were romantically involved. It was featured in DC Comics' Gotham City Villains, an anthology comic celebrating Batman's rogues gallery.

“I got into the fact that I've always been a big fan of Michelle Pfeiffer's, and the Penguin obviously lusts after Catwoman”, the Oscar nominee told Entertainment Weekly at the time. “So I figured I'd put those two together”.

Farrell, who played the same role in HBO’s drama ‘The Penguin’, which aired last fall, asked DeVito if he'd play the DC Comics villain again. “Absolutely”, answered DeVito. “You can go off the rails with something. The operatic element of Tim Burton’s Batman Returns was my favorite thing about it, the music and sets and the whole thing. The Shakespeare of it, ‘All the world’s a stage’. Oswald’s realm and his penguins and his minions and his passion. I loved that”.

--IANS

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