Wrong penguin, right wing: The Full Monty director casts accidental bird in botched pic of Argentine coup

The Penguin Lessons — a film inspired by an English teacher saving an oil-soaked Magellanic penguin in 1970s Argentina — has managed to do something remarkable. 

It cast the wrong bird.

In the latest cinematic case of “close enough”, not just any wrong penguin. A representative of a seriously threatened species. From the other side of the South American continent.

The penguin starring alongside the Oscar-nominated Steve Coogan is, beyond a shadow of a biological doubt, a Humboldt penguin (Spheniscus humboldti) — not the native Magellanic penguin (Spheniscus magellanicus) central to the real-life memoir on which the film is based.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdjEXNX1nSA

The evidence? Impeccable. The Humboldt’s single black breast band, rather than the Magellanic’s double black band— as spotted by Daily Maverick’s Biological Investigation and Regional Discrepancy Specialists (BIRDS). 

Unlike the Magellanic penguin, the Humboldt’s bill is surrounded by pink flesh.

To ensure we weren’t hallucinating, we consulted a seabird expert — who asked not to be named, citing professional constraints, institutional discretion and a deep desire not to get dragged into a penguin controversy on their lunch break.

“Errmerrrgerrrrd,” they replied to BIRDS’ bewildered WhatsApp. “No, you’re not hallucinating … What the actual f**k.”

Somewhere, David Attenborough is quietly screaming into a pillow.

A Magellanic penguin at San Francisco Zoo. (Photo: Sanjay Acharya, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

A Humboldt penguin at Newquay Zoo. (Photo: Sanjay Acharya, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

A tale of one misplaced penguin

The real “Juan Salvador”, the penguin from Tom Michell’s 2016 memoir, was a Magellanic penguin rescued from the horrors of an oil spill in Uruguay, just above coastal Argentina.

In adapting the memoir, this Sony Pictures Classics film may have opted for historical charm and emotional uplift, but missed geographic and taxonomic accuracy entirely.

The Magellanic penguin mostly hails from Argentina, southern Chile and islands. The Humboldt penguin basically hails from Peru and north and central Chile. Unless transcontinental cosplay is an evolutionary strategy, the species may share only a tiny overlap.

You might as well cast a black rhino (hook-lipped, critically endangered) to masquerade as a white rhino (broad-lipped, near-threatened). And hedge your bets no one will care.

The not-so-funny drama to save a species

But the penguin switcheroo, por que? It raises some troubling conservation and education questions. Take Magellanic penguins, of which there are between 2.2 million and 3.2 million individuals in the wild. Unsurprisingly, the IUCN Red List — the gold standard of threatened species — classifies it as “least concern” but declining.

Last assessed as vulnerable in 2020, the Humboldt, on the other hand, is in big trouble. 

Its numbers have plunged by about 10,000 individuals in just a few years. Today, there are probably no more than 23,800 left.

Seen in perspective, Humboldts aren’t much more numerous than the world’s most threatened penguin — the African penguin (Spheniscus demersus), of which only 19,800 remain.

The IUCN classified the African penguin as critically endangered in 2024 and it’s identified by only a slightly thinner breast band than the Humboldt.

The African version looks so much like its Humboldt counterpart that even experts could get tripped up thinking The Penguin Lessons stars the world’s most imperilled penguin. Parading an endangered species in a film as one that is of least concern could — conceivably — make it seem far more common than it is. 

When fact-checking fails, feathers fly 

If Hollywood can CGI a talking raccoon into a galaxy-saving hero, should it be able to tell one penguin from another — or try? Daily Maverick asked a few more seabird specialists.

BIRDS can confirm that Juan Salvador was not portrayed by an African penguin.

At least, that’s what Dr Alistair McInnes, BirdLife South Africa’s seabird conservation programme manager, thinks. 

“Based on the extensive amount of pink at the base of the bill, it looks like a Humboldt penguin,” said McInnes.

The smoking gun came from an actual Humboldt penguinologist. 

“I looked at the link you sent me and... it is... 100%... 1,000% a nice, cute Humboldt penguin. So, you are right!” Dr Alejandro Simeone, a Humboldt penguin expert at Andrés Bello University in Chile, wrote by email. “If the movie is based in Argentina, it should be a Magellanic.” 

But then the nuts and bolts of science may not always be what makes Oscar-nominated director Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty) tick.  

In a YouTube interview with the good people of Bafta, Cattaneo highlighted his animal handler’s penchant for zooming off in a prepacked van and saving penguins’ lives. You know, “if there’s actually ever an oil spill, or something similar, anywhere in Northern Europe”.  

At this point, memoir author Tom Michell was perched next to Cattaneo. And he was paying attention.

“But,” the stony-faced author interjected, “there aren’t any penguins in Northern Europe?”

Cattaneo corrected himself by saying he was talking about sea lions.

BIRDS consulted our sea lion sister bureau, the Biological Assessment of Regional Know-Names (BARK), which confirms what we suspected: that Northern Europe doesn’t have any wild sea lions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn3x9TL54xI

Margaret, the Magellanics and the ghosts of geography

The Penguin Lessons is set against the fall of Argentina’s 1976 Peronist government which makes way for the brutal military dictatorship known as the National Reorganisation Process. 

The movie does not have anything to do with the Argentine/UK war over the Falklands/Malvinas Islands, which unfolded a few years later in 1982.

But it’s instructive to think that the penguin film is set in a time that leads to the junta’s unsuccessful campaign to reclaim the Falklands/Malvinas.

Margaret Thatcher, of course, responded with force, retaining an iron grip on one of the world’s largest breeding colonies of Magellanic penguins.

Javier Milei, Argentina’s chainsaw-wielding president, probably still thinks London owes Buenos Aires a lot of penguins. Lima and Santiago — Humboldt penguin central — would back Milei on this one.

So, reenacting the logic of taking what suits the narrative, even where it may not belong, is a possible geopolitical humdinger that an English film about an Argentine coup wants to avoid. 

But why use the wrong penguin?

According to Christina Hagen, Pamela Isdell fellow of penguin conservation at BirdLife South Africa, “there is quite a big population of Humboldts and other banded penguins in captivity. As long as they followed animal welfare regulations for animals in movies, it wouldn’t affect the wild population.”

In an odd real-life plot twist, My Penguin Friend is also a new film about a Magellanic penguin rescued from an oil spill who befriends a human in need of help. 

Yes, you can’t make this stuff up. 

Starring Jean Reno (La Femme Nikita), the 2024 production used 10 rescued Magellanic penguins from Brazil’s Ubatuba Aquarium to portray the penguin lead. This film’s easy-to-find press notes not only declare extensive details about the penguin actors’ rescue origins, they also tell an educational story of what threatens their wild counterparts — stuff like oil spills, ocean trash, guano mining and overfishing. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE0kfDCiod0

In other words, if a journalist gets it wrong, it’s on them. 

BIRDS could not find evidence that The Penguin Lessons — which has netted reviews in BBC Wildlife Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times and more — followed the same transparency policy. If anything, none of these reviews reported the filmmakers’ unusual species choice.

So, we went to the filmmakers. 

The film’s South African reps told us that the film employed six penguin actors to play the lead. As penguins are social creatures, each penguin had a penguin boyfriend or girlfriend on set. The American Humane Society, they pointed out, monitored the 12 penguins’ welfare. 

Answers were not received within 48 hours by 1o.30am on Thursday clarifying the film’s casting choice. We also did not receive information on whether the penguins were sourced from licensed, captive environments. Were production credits and press materials updated to reflect the correct species and their origin? 

No answers were received from Sony Pictures Classics to our repeated requests for access to password-protected press materials, first sent on 5 May. Ster Kinekor, which has aired the film in South Africa in recent weeks, responded promptly with press notes. But these did not acknowledge the species switch, either.

The real cautionary tale?

It’s worth the reminder that Tom Michell, the real-life teacher, got the Magellanic penguin right in his own memoir — devoting extensive passages to its conservation status and biological behaviour.

In an interview with the blog Honest Mum, Michell has also revealed that most of the film was, in fact, “real Humboldt penguin footage” — that is, where animatronic penguins weren’t used to film more demanding sequences.

The error lies not with the young traveller-turned-environmentalist who lived a heartfelt story, and recounted it in a nuanced conservation narrative, but the production team who retold it. 

And yet, The Penguin Lessons achieves its aim as lite escapism about cross-species friendship during political turbulence. 

Apart from an unseeable species faux pas, it’s good at communicating humanity’s careless footprint to a general audience. It demonstrates the therapeutic value of the natural world.

This was a tale worth retelling — with the right penguin. DM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk