They say never work with children or animals – but that wasn’t the reason why Steve Coogan was initially resistant to star in The Penguin Lessons.
“I was working on another project with (screenwriter) Jeff Pope, as we work together quite frequently, and he told me he was writing something about a penguin”, Coogan told Zavvi. “It was his suggestion that I read it and potentially star in it, and my initial reaction was that I didn’t want to make a movie about an animal.
“It always looks like a cynical move on the part of an actor, to star in a movie alongside a cuddly animal in the hope of reaching a bigger audience. I was resistant to the project until I discovered the story was set under the banner of a fascist dictatorship; Jeff brought it to me again and twisted my arm, and then I was on board.”
Adapted from Tom Michell’s 2015 memoir of the same name, Coogan stars as Michell, a jaded English expat who in the late seventies takes a job teaching English at an elite Argentinian boarding school. This coincides with the dark, transitional period in which the military overthrew the government, although Tom couldn’t care less about what’s going on around him, using the break from class as an excuse to go on a bender in Uruguay.
However, whilst there, he becomes the unexpected guardian to a penguin he nurses back to health after washing to the shore, injured from an oil spill. He only does it to try and impress a woman, and when she leaves, his attempts to get rid of it all backfire, leading him to sneak the animal (named Juan Salvador) back into Argentina and into a new home in the school grounds.
Naturally, his new role as a guardian to the vulnerable penguin helps him regain a sense of responsibility just as people around him start getting kidnapped off the streets for protesting the dictatorship. It’s basically I’m Still Here meets Marley & Me, but with a penguin, and it unexpectedly works despite the insane elevator pitch.
Two penguin performers were used to portray Juan Salvador, with only a couple of complex shots requiring animatronic stand-ins. Knowing that he’d be spending a lot of time sharing the screen with penguins, Coogan realised that one of his main responsibilities would be caring for them, not just treating them as scene partners.
He explained: “When I agreed to do the film, I knew it would be difficult, but that alone isn’t a reason to avoid doing it. There was a natural anxiety because I had only ever seen them up close in a zoo, and I wanted to get past that unfamiliarity.
“Before we shot, I went to the zoo where they were kept, spending a lot of time in the pool enclosure where they were looked after. It was important to lift them up and become comfortable with them, because that’s the same journey my character had, and I needed those scenes to feel natural – I didn’t want it to look like I still had anxiety, as then the film just wouldn’t work.
“I spent a lot of time with the two penguins, talking to them and stroking them, and I only got nipped by them a couple of times! They make you work hard for their affection, especially Richard, the male penguin we used, but the female one, Baba, was far more affable and approachable.”
Despite the heavy weight of the historical subject matter – and the parallels to the modern day, which weren’t lost on the cast and crew – having two penguins hanging out on set made it one of the best shooting experiences everybody involved had ever experienced.
“One of your main welfare responsibilities when you’re looking after a penguin is to keep noise levels down, so whenever there’s a problem, we couldn’t raise merry hell. Staying as calm as possible had a knock-on effect for the crew, so the issues we’d often have problems with never did, as whenever something went wrong, we’d think of the penguin and work through it!”
Coogan’s co-star Jonathan Pryce, who plays the school’s stern headmaster, was even more trepidatious to spend time with a vulnerable animal.
He told Zavvi: “I was even more wary than Steve, as I’m not a great person with animals or birds, so I was very nervous when I had to finally go meet the penguin. I was encouraged to stroke it and touch it, and I did neither!
“I wanted to preserve my distance as much as I could, because my character is distant from the penguin; it takes him a while to go on the journey of discovery that the animal is a nice presence to be around. I only ever had one big scene with it, where I’m confessing all my problems to it like I was talking to a psychiatrist – the penguin refused to listen whilst we were filming, he kept walking away from me!”
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, still one of Pryce’s most beloved leading roles. That Orwellian satire of bureaucratic dictatorships was made during a period when cinema tended to avoid discussing the reality of the global political climate head-on – following the Oscar success of I’m Still Here, it does beg the question as to whether we’re only now comfortable exploring the trauma of the recent past.
“I think the reason that more British and American films are comfortable exploring this now is because of the way they parallel the political situation of today”, Pryce continued. “We’re supposed to learn from our history, and through the history of Argentina, we can see some of the things which are still going wrong in our society.”
In short; come for the cute penguin, stay for the political commentary.
The Penguin Lessons is released in UK cinemas on Friday, 18th April.
