The Batman star Colin Farrell has said his character, The Penguin, wasn’t allowed to smoke in the film.

The actor, set to play the antagonist in Matt Reeves’ forthcoming DC film, told Jakes Takes that he had fought for the Penguin to smoke a cigar.

• READ MORE: ‘The Batman’ movie: release date, plot details, cast and everything we know so far

Warner Bros’ reasoning came from the studio’s vigilance about showing cigarettes onscreen in superhero films, despite other iterations of the Penguin (real name Oswald “Oz” Chesterfield Cobblepot) famously smoking from a cigarette holder.

“I fought valiantly for a cigar, I even said at one stage, ‘Can I have it unlit,’ and they were like no,” Farrell said.

“The Oz that we meet hasn’t embodied the energy of the Penguin that we recognise from the source comics and from previous films, so I’ll see if it goes again. I’d love to explore it because he’s not an underboss, he’s not a boss, he’s just a soldier of Falcone at this stage.

“But he has great ambition and dreams of doing big big things.”

Meanwhile, Farrell’s co-star Paul Dano, who plays The Riddler, said he had trouble sleeping while preparing for the role.

“There were some nights around that I probably didn’t sleep as well as I would’ve wanted to just because it was a little hard to come down from this character,” Dano told Entertainment Weekly, discussing a specific scene with Peter Sarsgaard’s character Gil Colson.

“It takes a lot of energy to get there. And so you almost have to sustain it once you’re there because going up and down is kind of hard.”