Here’s What Burgess Meredith Hated About Playing the Penguin on ‘Batman’

Growing up, I absolutely loved the 1960s Batman TV series. As I reflect back on the show now, as much as I loved Adam West and Burt Ward as the Dynamic Duo, it was the amazing work of the actors who played the villains that really helped make the show something very special. And of those villains, I’ve got to tip my hat to Burgess Meredith, who really did a wonderful job of bringing that felonious archfiend, The Penguin, to life — though he didn’t like that fans instantly recognized him as his character, even when he was out of costume.

How did Burgess Meredith become the Penguin?

As a kid, I didn’t realize just how funny Batman was. It really is quite a credit to the makers of that series that I felt like the Caped Crusaders were truly in peril. By the end of the first part of most two-part episodes, regardless of the villain, I would find myself biting my nails, wondering if this would finally be the time that Batman and the Boy Wonder had met their match.

It seemed to me like The Penguin was the smartest and wiliest of all the villains, and there was truly something about the way that Burgess Meredith portrayed him, with an interpretation that was very true to the comic book version of the character. Although Julie Newmar‘s Catwoman will probably always be my favorite of Batman’s TV rogues gallery, if I had to rank the actors based on how true they were to the characters they were playing, I think I’d put Burgess’s Penguin right at the top.

While Burgess had been a recognizable movie star prior to Batman, he was also very much a working actor who guest-starred in hundreds of TV shows and spent an awful lot of time doing live theater. Simply put, for a time, Burgess was one of the busiest fellers in Hollywood. I recall listening to a podcast with his granddaughter where she talked about going to a video rental store with him and thinking that her grandfather was pretty much in every movie in the store.

What didn’t Burgess Meredith like about playing the Penguin?

(c) 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved. Courtesy: Everett Collection.

As much as Burgess loved working on Batman — loved the cast and the really wonderful scripts that he was given —there were a couple of things that he really did not like.

First and foremost, he didn’t like that people still recognized him as The Penguin, even when he wasn’t in costume. It just didn’t make sense to him. He had this big prosthetic nose, a fake belly, and all sorts of other costume tweaks that gave him a penguin-like appearance, and yet people would still say, “Hey, there’s The Penguin,” whenever he was out in public. Yep, it was a bit of a hit to his vanity.

Burgess also didn’t like that The Penguin smoked. He had given up smoking himself, and he told William Dozier, the show’s producer, that if he ended up getting hooked again, things wouldn’t go well for anyone involved with the show. In the end, Burgess did manage to make lemonade out of lemons in that he developed The Penguin’s trademark “quacking” sound as a means of suppressing the coughs that he felt were coming every time he took a puff.

At the end of the day, yes, there were things that Burgess didn’t like about playing The Penguin. But he really did love the character, and he loved being part of a cultural phenomenon the way that Batman was during the late sixties.

By the way, a lot of the information that I got for this piece can be found in a really fun interview that Burgess Meredith did, along with Cesar Romero, Adam West, and Julie Newmar, way back in 1989 for CBS This Morning. At the time of the interview, it had been two decades since he had played The Penguin, but he still clearly enjoyed reminiscing about the show and the character.