At the corner of Broadway and industrial hell, there’s a nightclub called the Iceberg Lounge—within it, a man in a black and white suit, his face a corkboard of scars. His city is an amalgamation of unnamed metropolises balled up into a wad of violence and smog, a land of close encounters: one street to the left of a beating, one word away from a deal gone sour.

Despite the gritty nature of his role in the soon-to-be-released HBO miniseries, The Penguin, set in Batman’s Gotham, I would describe my chat with actor Rhenzy Feliz as reasonably light-hearted. We discuss his “embarrassing” obsessions—Love Island (UK) and Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please”— before turning to his role as teenager Victor Aguilar in the newest DC installation.

The 26-year-old appears alongside Colin Farrell, descending into the deviant world of crime lord Oswald Cobblepot aka Penguin, a supervillain most recently pictured in The Batman (2022). Raised by a well-meaning family in a muck of bad circumstances, Victor becomes Oz’s protégé, dragged into the beating heart of Gotham’s crime ring. To prepare for the role, Feliz took Victor out onto the streets of New York, popping into supermarkets and ordering at the local deli to practice his character’s dialect. “You want to get to a point where you feel prepared,” he shares, “like you get this human being, and whenever you’re saying the lines, it feels like they’re actually coming out of you.”

It wasn’t until late high school that Feliz took a leap of faith into the acting world, quitting baseball (“a massive deal at the time”) and auditioning for the school play. In 2016, two months into having an agent, he booked a 10-episode role on the Hulu series, Casual. During this time, the young actor tore through screenplays, analyzing the texts, dissecting their compounds. 

He reflects on a tidbit that George Clooney recounted on the set of The Tender Bar: “You can make a bad movie out of a good script, but you can’t make a good movie out of a bad one.” Reading The Penguin for the first time, Feliz recognized the strength of its skeleton—a base upon which to build the labyrinthine universe of Gotham.

Feliz was sucked into the world of heroes and villains in 2017 when he starred as Alex Wilder in Runaways, a show based on a series of Marvel comics that chronicle a group of super- powered teens on the run from their criminal parents. A few years later, he appeared in Disney’s Encanto as shapeshifter Camilo, and despite receiving zero musical training, his part in “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” contributed to the hit song’s #1 spot on Billboard’s Top 100 Chart.

On-screen, it seems the young actor is drawn to the paranormal, so he recognizes the touch of the supernatural when it infiltrates his personal life. “There’s this magic I feel when I see a movie that I’m in love with,” he considers. “It’s just this awe and massive adoration, like I’m watching a magic trick go on before me. It’s not real, but it can make you feel: the time that your grandmother passed away, the father that you lost, the little brother that you love with all your heart.”

In September, Feliz will also be appearing as Peter in Netflix series, Penelope, following a teen who feels alienated from contemporary society and turns to the wilderness. This and other upcoming roles seem to capture the spirit with which Feliz consumes his chosen art—pulling at that magic thread. The Penguin itself is almost a trick, a disappearing act. Gotham transforms within a nanosecond: a bullet leaves the barrel, a shadow flashes beneath a street lamp. There and then gone.

Photographed by David Urbanke

Styled by Jordan Dorso

Written by Emma Raff

Grooming: Scott McMahan at Honey Artists