SPOILER WARNING: This story discusses major plot developments in Season 1, Episode 4 of “The Penguin,” currently airing on HBO and streaming on Max.
Cristin Milioti has grown quite familiar with the superhero song and dance. After launching her career in 2011 with her Tony-nominated role in “Once” and in 2013 as the Mother in the final season of “How I Met Your Mother,” the New Jersey native began making the rounds for the handful of roles available to women in comic book adaptations.
“Oh my God, if there’s someone around my age in it … I’ve tested for, like, you name it,” the 39-year-old says with an eye roll. “I just couldn’t get in there — not for lack of trying.”
So in 2022, when Milioti was approached about playing the unhinged mobster Sofia Falcone in “The Penguin” — starring Colin Farrell as Oz Cobb, the role he originated in Matt Reeves’ 2022 blockbuster “The Batman” — she was understandably wary of further disappointment. “I was trying to keep my expectations in the basement,” she tells Variety. “I’d dreamed of playing a villain my whole life.”
Not only did Milioti land the part, but she’s earned some of her best-ever reviews for her ferocious performance as Sofia, who is introduced just days after being released from Arkham Asylum, where she’d spent 10 years for serial murders that earned her the moniker the Hangman. While “The Penguin” has largely tracked Oz’s bid to wrest control of Gotham City’s underworld, Sofia takes center stage in its fourth episode, entitled “Cent’Anni,” which debuted Oct. 13. The show jumps back to just before Sofia’s incarceration, and finally reveals the real story behind the Hangman’s crimes — and what happened to Sofia in Arkham.
It turns out that Sofia’s father, Carmine (Mark Strong), is the real Hangman, and one of his victims was Sofia’s mother — a revelation Sofia comes to after she’s confronted by a dogged reporter with evidence that several women who worked in Carmine’s exclusive club, 44 Below, were all strangled to death. Oz, who at that time was working as Sofia’s driver, tells Carmine about Sofia’s meeting with the reporter; when Carmine confronts her about it, she begins asking the wrong questions about how her mother died.
On a dime, Carmine — who’d just started to see Sofia as his true heir apparent, rather than his ineffectual son, Alberto (Michael Zegen) — turns on his daughter. He has the reporter murdered, plants evidence with corrupt Gotham PD officers to frame Sofia for the Hangman murders, and compels the rest of Sofia’s family, other than Alberto, to give false testimony that Sofia is mentally ill and dangerous. Overnight, Sofia’s posh and privileged life turns upside down: After becoming a tabloid sensation as a serial killer, she’s sent to Arkham, where she’s brutalized both by her fellow inmates and the physicians tasked with her care, despite her constant, panicked protestations of her innocence.
Over the course of the episode, Milioti painstakingly charts not only Sofia’s descent into madness, but how it transforms her from an innocent (at least, as much as the daughter of a crime kingpin can be) into the homicidal psychopath that she’d been wrongly accused of being. By the end of the episode, back in the present day, Sofia calmly waits until her family is asleep in the Carmine mansion, and then pipes carbon monoxide throughout the house, gassing them all to death — save her young niece and the Falcone underboss, Johnny Viti (Michael Kelly).
Suffice it to say, even with her standout work in projects like the acclaimed 2017 “Black Mirror” installment “USS Callister” and the 2020 sci-fi rom-com “Palm Springs,” “Cent’Anni” provides Milioti with a tour-de-force showcase unlike anything she’s received before.
Macall Polay / HBO
“Selfishly, as an actor, I read that episode and was like, ‘I can’t believe I’m going to get to play all these things,’” she says. “It’s a full-course meal, and they don’t come around all the time. I definitely felt an enormous responsibility — and pressure that I put on myself — of wanting to do this justice.”
To fulfill that ambition, she collaborated with movement coach Julia Crockett to work out how Sofia’s years in Arkham affected her body. “She goes from one horrific place back into another horrific place,” Milioti says, referencing Sofia’s return to her family after leaving Arkham. “What does that do to you when you have to constantly be on guard and can’t have a single moment’s breath?”
She also wanted to capture how Sofia’s appearance transmutes from quiet luxury pre-Arkham into a deliberately garish veneer after she’s released. “The women in that family, the only way they express themselves is through clothes and hair and makeup,” Milioti says. “If you take that way of learning and then put it through Arkham, how does that come out? I really wanted her hair to be feral, but it could hidden when she was around her family. I wanted it to go on this journey of her becoming more and more wild.”
Although Sofia’s post-Arkham appearance does evoke Talia Shire’s performance as Connie Corleone in “The Godfather,” Milioti says it wasn’t a conscious choice. “I do remember at one point thinking, ‘Oh, we have a similar updo,’” she says with a chuckle. But she and “The Penguin” showrunner Lauren LeFranc did discuss Sofia’s similarities with a different character from the cinema classic, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino).
“Michael is this golden child who is better at [organized crime] than maybe he thought he was,” she says. “But that is different from Sofia. Certainly, she was the apple of her father’s eye until she wasn’t, but I think she’s always known that she would be good at this, even if she had qualms about it. And, obviously, Arkham brought that out more.”
The bigger challenge for Milioti, however, was giving herself permission to make the kind of brazen choices called for in the script. Her co-star Deirdre O’Connell, who plays Oz’s mother, introduced Milioti to the practice of watching other performances not for inspiration, but “for courage” — like Gena Rowlands in the 1980 crime thriller “Gloria,” in which she plays a gangster’s ex-girlfriend on the run with a young boy.
“I had never seen that performance,” Milioti says. “That’s not Sofia, but just watching someone swing for the fences, just really go for it, [helped me] just be like, ‘OK, look at what you can do.’”
Milioti also credits Helen Shaver, who directed Episode 4, for fostering an unusually collaborative environment on set among the background actors playing the other inmates at Arkham. “She sat with all of us and she was like, ‘I want everyone here to come up with a character. When Sofia walks through, I want to see an individual. I want us all to make this world together,’” Milioti says with a shudder. “I’m getting chills thinking about it. When I’m walking down those aisles of the mess hall, I am experiencing completely different, terrifying people.”
That kind of immersion made the moment when Sofia finally snaps and violently murders another inmate, Magpie (Marié Botha), that much more vivid and visceral. “They’re all screaming and banging on tables,” Milioti says. “It made it feel like play. Everyone was in it together, so it would let you go to bigger and bigger places with it.”
Milioti is loath, however, to dive into detail about her acting process, like the backstory of the scars that riddle Sofia’s body. “I had my own ideas of what they all were” is what she’ll reveal. “All this makes me look — I mean, I am saying it, but it is a little eye roll-y,” she says with a good-natured shrug. “I don’t like to read about, like, how actors figure things out. I just like to be in the magic of the thing. But I’m probably being overly precious — which is also a very actorly thing to do.”
Certainly, Milioti is not complaining. Far from it. “I definitely feel spoiled,” she says of getting to play Sofia. “I felt like I was in my backyard, a little kid again.” She breaks into a radiant smile. “Yes, there’s darkness, but I had the time of my life.”