How Cristin Milioti Made Sofia Falcone an All-Time TV Villain
This story contains spoilers from episode 7 of The Penguin.
I won’t name any names, but we’ve lived through a rough few years of comic-book adaptations on the big (and small) screen. Honestly, I didn't realise the extent of my trauma—maybe a hair dramatic, but you get the point—until I watched HBO’s The Penguin. A spin-off of director Matt Reeves’s excellent film The Batman, the series depicts Oz Cobb’s (played by a majorly transformed, shit-talking Colin Farrell) rise to power in Gotham. His adversary is Sofia Falcone (a downright creepy Cristin Milioti), who escalates their beef into yet another war in the tormented city.
While watching Milioti and Farrell pull out nearly every damn trick in their bags, I found myself asking hilariously rudimental questions such as Wait, how am I actually afraid of these villains? and How will Battinson defeat them? Plus, an incredulous I actually have a deep understanding of why these two humans are so despicable?!? While most superhero stories fail to build up one believable villain, The Penguin delivers two. It’s almost embarrassing to say out loud—which I did in a recent interview with Milioti—but that’s the tale of this genre lately.
“Something that I really love about our show is that you find yourself rooting for these people despite that,” Milioti says. “My favourite movies or television shows keep you on your toes and make you wonder why your allegiance to different characters switches. I was hopeful that that’s what would happen [on The Penguin]. That’s what it felt like to make.” (Well, it did happen. And the result is one of the best shows of the year.)
The thirty-nine-year-old actress previously shined in the likes of Palm Springs, The Resort, How I Met Your Mother, The Wolf of Wall Street, and 30 Rock. Read: a lot of comedies, many of which were the romantic sort. (Save for the Martin Scorsese joint, of course.) On The Penguin, Milioti breaks out an out-of-nowhere performance as Falcone, the heiress to her father’s crime family. Over the course of the series, we see her encounter a very Gotham-esque assortment of hard knocks, one of which is an extended vacation to Arkham Asylum. As Sofia, Milioti seamlessly blends joyous Adam West–era camp (she eats with her hands!) with Christopher Nolan–worthy dramatics—which are on full display in episode 7, during a series-changing interrogation scene.
In advance of The Penguin’s season finale this Sunday, Milioti dishes on episode 7, her future beyond Sofia Falcone, and the wonders of a comic-book adaptation that’s so damn Italian. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Is The Penguin the most Italian comic-book adaptation of all time?
[Laughs.] That’s so funny. I don’t know. That’s a question for [showrunner] Lauren LeFranc. I mean, you know, some of it’s already intrinsically there because you’re like, in the Mafia. That’s one of the things I really love about everyone’s iteration of Batman. So in the Christopher Nolan ones, [Sal Maroni] is a mafioso. And then you see John Tuturro and how, in our interpretation, [the Mafia] definitely exists. This series combines Arkham and Gotham’s Mafia, which is such a sweet spot.
Who made the decision to have Sofia eat with her hands?
At the funeral?
Yes. Plus the meatballs.
Of course. The meatballs, too. A lot of that was in the script. The only one that we made up on the day—and I might be wrong—is at the funeral, where I grab pasta out of the bowl in front of everybody. I loved that detail so much. It’s so good. It's so off-putting and strange. Also, this is someone who has eaten in the mess hall of an insane asylum for ten years. She’s constantly a hurricane of feeling and impulse in an incredibly unsafe environment. When it comes up, it adds to how feral she is.
Well, you’ve said in other interviews that Batman’s world is inherently campy. I feel like you married that with a serious dramatic sensibility.
That's why I like Batman. It’s very heightened and larger than life, but it’s also about people’s pain. It’s like emotions when you’re a teenager; they feel big things and it creates this universe of villains. You know, that’s not that far off from the world we live in. You see that these villains are comic book-y and campy and all these things, but actually it’s more of a balance. I like that.
Tell me about the conversation Sofia has with the little girl in this episode. It’s very meta—and you see Sofia cycle through so many emotions without saying them explicitly.
That scene was one of my favourites of the whole show. There were just endless layers to it, because of the meta-ness of what she’s doing. She’s creating another her. She so fiercely believes that she’s doing the right thing. Again, I just can't sing Lauren LeFranc’s praises enough. One of the many complexities of Sofia is this villain logic: These people deserved to die. And I have done you a huge service. I have saved you from my life.
In that exact moment, she sentenced that child to exactly her life. Like, she’s literally in an institution. She’s completely alone. She’s starting to abuse herself. Obviously, you begin to feel like she’s turning into her father….But she was more than willing to take over the family, knowing what it is that he does. Maybe not to the extent, but she’s so smart. She knows. Her exertion of power is so similar to his. The horror of that moment for her is realising that she has become the person she rails against the most. The fact that it all happens in that one sequence is so beautiful.
That leads to the interrogation scene with Francis Cobb, in which Sofia leaves with two realisations: One, fuck up Oz, and two, I want freedom.
That scene was also one of my favourites to film because Didi [actress Deirdre O'Connell] is a complete... Acting in a scene with her is like getting into a ring with Muhammad Ali, but it’s joyful to be pummelled by her. That scene is so interesting because she's seeing Oz’s origin story play out in front of her. Francis says all these things to her about herself that are completely right. Sofia says, “I keep trying on all these faces, but none of them feel quite right.” It’s really that point where she’s trying on all these different things and yet being the most herself she’s ever been.
Why does Sofia ultimately spare Francis but choose to nearly kill Oz and create another catastrophe in Gotham?
It’s what I was talking about earlier with villains in this universe—having so much hurt and wanting to exert that. What makes them such good nemeses is that they know the exact thing that’s a fate worse than death for the other one.
It’s like a family.
And it’s all psychological. I mean, it’s violent, too. But for Sofia, the final step with Oz is: I’m gonna ruin you. I’m going to ruin your brain for life the way mine has been. Death would be a relief for him. Which is what he did to me. He took the person I loved the most away. There’s a bottomless pit to her grief and anger.
It feels like what we’re talking about is something that could happen at a dramatic family dinner. Still, it’s such a cliché to be like, “The comic-book show is grounded in real emotions!” But The Penguin walks the walk in that respect.
That’s why we love these movies. They’re a way of putting whatever you’re going through personally aside, but you can still feel all those big feelings. I was just saying this to someone the other day. What I love about Batman, specifically, is that he’s a vigilante. He has zero superpowers. He literally just makes stuff alone in his garage because he’s so hurt. And then he goes out in the night looking for bad people to crush. Who has not read something and wanted to go and fix it? We all feel these various systems fail us. And there’s a real fantasy with him. We feel like we could all go out into the night and make things right. That is so specific to this universe. It allows you to feel the ways in which you’ve been hurt….It speaks to the very real parts of living today in society and being very frustrated.
That’s such a good way to put it: “I want to fix things.”
In a way, that’s Sofia. It's certainly not my logic; it’s villain logic. But she’s like, “I’m gonna. I’m gonna fix this, Gia. I’m gonna make things right here.”
You’ve obviously played so many different roles in your career, but now you’ve received so much praise for this villainous, dramatic character. Is there anything you haven't done yet that you’d really love to do?
I would love to play Sofia again, but I would also be so interested in—I mean, this is off the top of my head. I’m definitely interested in doing things I haven’t done yet. I would love to do a big movie musical. I would really be interested in a period piece, weirdly. Sit in a bustle on a cliff somewhere. Like, nobody ever asked me about doing that! [Laughs.] I never get those emails. I’m just interested in what that would be like, you know?
I will say that watching Colin in prosthetics made me be like, “I want to try that.” It’s so brutal. What a brutal way to start your morning. It’s three hours every day. But I was like, “Ooh, I want to do that. I want to try that one time.”
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