Cristin Milioti on Arkham Asylum and the identity of the Executioner

SPOILER WARNING: This story discusses the major plot developments in Season 1, Episode 4 of “The Penguin,” currently airing on HBO and streaming on Max.

Cristin Milioti has become quite familiar with the song and dance of superheroes. After launching her career in 2011 with her Tony-nominated role in “Once” and in 2013 as Mother in the final season of “How I Met Your Mother,” the New Jersey native began making the rounds for the handful of roles that was available to women in comic book adaptations.

“Oh my God, if there’s someone my age in there… I tested for, 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 when Milioti was approached in 2022 to play rogue gangster Sofia Falcone in “The Penguin” — starring Colin Farrell as Oz Cobb, the role he played in Matt Reeves’ 2022 blockbuster “The Batman” — she was understandably wary of further disappointment. . “I tried to live up to my expectations in the basement,” she says Variety. “I’ve dreamed of playing a villain all my life.”

Not only did Milioti get the role, but she also received some of her best reviews ever for her ruthless performance as Sofia, who is introduced just days after her release from Arkham Asylum, where she had spent ten years for serial killings that earned her. nicknamed the Executioner. While “The Penguin” has largely followed Oz’s attempt to take control of Gotham City’s underworld, Sofia takes center stage in the fourth episode, titled “Cent’Anni,” which debuted on October 13. The show jumps back to just before Sofia’s incarceration, finally revealing the real story behind the Executioner’s crimes – and what happened to Sofia in Arkham.

It turns out that Sofia’s father, Carmine (Mark Strong), is the real Executioner, and one of his victims was Sofia’s mother – a revelation Sofia comes to after she is confronted by a persistent reporter with evidence that several women living in Carmine’s exclusive club worked, 44 Below, were all strangled. Oz, who was working as Sofia’s driver at the time, tells Carmine about Sofia’s encounter with the reporter; When Carmine confronts her, she starts asking the wrong questions about how her mother died.

In no time, Carmine – who had just begun to see Sofia as his true heir to the throne, rather than as his ineffectual son, Alberto (Michael Zegen) – turns on his daughter. He has the reporter killed, plants evidence on corrupt Gotham PD officers to frame Sofia for the Hangman murders, and forces the rest of Sofia’s family, except Alberto, to give false testimony that Sofia is mentally ill and dangerous. Overnight, Sofia’s chic and privileged life is turned upside down: after becoming a gossip sensation as a serial killer, she is sent to Arkham, where she is abused by both her fellow inmates and the doctors in charge of her care, despite her constant, panicked protests against her. innocence.

Over the course of the episode, Milioti painstakingly charts not only Sofia’s descent into madness, but how it turns her from an innocent (at least, as far as the daughter of a crime kingpin can be) into the murderous psychopath she had been. wrongly accused. Towards the end of the episode, in the present day, Sofia waits quietly until her family is asleep at the Carmine mansion, then pipes carbon monoxide through the house, gassing them all to death – except her young niece and Falcone’s underboss. Johnny Viti (Michael Kelly).

Suffice to say, even with her standout work in projects like the critically acclaimed 2017 “Black Mirror” episode “USS Callister” and the 2020 sci-fi rom-com “Palm Springs,” “Cent’Anni” Milioti is a gives a guided tour. the-force showcase like she has never received before.

“Selfishly, as an actor, I read that episode and thought, ‘I can’t believe I’m going to be playing all this stuff,’” she says. “It’s a full course meal and they don’t come around all the time. I definitely felt a huge responsibility – and the pressure I put on myself – to want to do this justice.”

To realize that ambition, she worked with exercise coach Julia Crockett to find out how Sofia’s years in Arkham affected her body. “She goes from one horrible place back to another horrible place,” Milioti says, referring to Sofia’s return to her family after leaving Arkham. “What does that do to you when you have to be on your guard all the time and you can’t breathe for a moment?”

She also wanted to capture how Sofia’s appearance changes from a low-key, pre-Arkham luxury to a deliberately garish veneer after her release. “The only way the women in that family can express themselves is through clothes, hair and makeup,” says Milioti. “If you take that approach to learning and then pass it on through Arkham, how does that work out? I really wanted her hair to be wild, but it could be hidden when she was around her family. I wanted it to go along on this journey of her becoming wilder and wilder.

Although Sofia’s post-Arkham performance is reminiscent of Talia Shire’s role as Connie Corleone in “The Godfather,” Milioti says it wasn’t a conscious choice. “I 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 to another character from the cinematic classic, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino).

“Michael is this golden child who is better at [organized crime] than he might have thought,” she says. “But that’s different with Sofia. Sure, she was the apple of her father’s eye until she wasn’t, but I think she always knew she would be good at this, even if she had doubts about it. And obviously Arkham brought that out even more.”

The bigger challenge for Milioti, however, was giving herself permission to make the kind of bold choices the script called for. Her co-star Deirdre O’Connell, who plays Oz’s mother, introduced Milioti to the habit of watching other performances, not for inspiration, but “for courage” — like Gena Rowlands in the 1980 crime thriller “Gloria,” in which she plays a character. gangster’s ex-girlfriend on the run with a young boy.

“I had never seen that performance,” Milioti says. “That’s not Sofia, it’s just watching someone swing for the fences, just really going for it, [helped me] just say, “Okay, see 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 who play the other prisoners at Arkham. “She sat with all of us and said, ‘I want everyone here to come up with a character. When Sofia walks through, I want to see someone. I want us all to make this world together,’” Milioti says, shuddering. ‘It gives me chills when I think about it. When I walk the aisles of the dining room, I experience completely different, terrifying people.

That kind of immersion made the moment when Sofia finally violently kills another inmate, Magpie (Marié Botha), much more vivid and visceral. “They’re all shouting and banging on tables,” Milioti says. “It felt like playing. Everyone was in it together, so you could take it to bigger and bigger places.”

However, Milioti is reluctant to delve into details about her acting process, such as the backstory of the scars that criss-cross Sofia’s body. “I had my own ideas about what they all were,” she will reveal. “All this makes me seem – I mean, I say it, but it’s a bit of an eye-roll,” she says with a good-natured shrug. “I don’t like reading about how actors figure things out. I just love being in the magic of the thing. But I’m probably being overly precious, which is also a very actorly thing to do.

Milioti certainly isn’t complaining. Far from it. “I feel absolutely spoiled,” she says of playing Sofia. “It felt like I was in my backyard, a little kid again.” She breaks into a radiant smile. “Yes, there is darkness, but I had the time of my life.”