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

Cristin Milioti has grown fairly accustomed to the superhero track and dance. After launching her profession in 2011 along with her Tony-nominated function in “As soon as” and in 2013 because the Mom within the remaining season of “How I Met Your Mom,” the New Jersey native started making the rounds for the handful of roles accessible to ladies in comedian guide variations.

“Oh my God, if there’s somebody round my age in it … I’ve examined for, like, you title it,” the 39-year-old says with an eye fixed roll. “I simply couldn’t get in there — not for lack of attempting.”

So in 2022, when Milioti was approached about enjoying the unhinged mobster Sofia Falcone in “The Penguin” — starring Colin Farrell as Oz Cobb, the function he originated in Matt Reeves’ 2022 blockbuster “The Batman” — she was understandably cautious of additional disappointment. “I used to be attempting to maintain my expectations within the basement,” she tells Selection. “I’d dreamed of enjoying a villain my complete life.”

Not solely did Milioti land the half, however she’s earned a few of her best-ever critiques for her ferocious efficiency as Sofia, who’s launched simply days after being launched from Arkham Asylum, the place she’d spent 10 years for serial murders that earned her the moniker the Hangman. Whereas “The Penguin” has largely tracked Oz’s bid to wrest management of Gotham Metropolis’s underworld, Sofia takes heart stage in its fourth episode, entitled “Cent’Anni,” which debuted Oct. 13. The present jumps again to only earlier than Sofia’s incarceration, and eventually reveals the true story behind the Hangman’s crimes — and what occurred to Sofia in Arkham. 

It seems that Sofia’s father, Carmine (Mark Sturdy), is the true Hangman, and one in every of his victims was Sofia’s mom — a revelation Sofia involves after she’s confronted by a dogged reporter with proof that a number of ladies who labored in Carmine’s unique membership, 44 Beneath, had been all strangled to loss of life. Oz, who at the moment was working as Sofia’s driver, tells Carmine about Sofia’s assembly with the reporter; when Carmine confronts her about it, she begins asking the fallacious questions on how her mom died. 

On a dime, Carmine — who’d simply began to see Sofia as his true inheritor obvious, relatively than his ineffectual son, Alberto (Michael Zegen) — activates his daughter. He has the reporter murdered, crops proof with corrupt Gotham PD officers to border Sofia for the Hangman murders, and compels the remainder of Sofia’s household, apart from Alberto, to provide false testimony that Sofia is mentally unwell and harmful. In a single day, Sofia’s posh and privileged life turns the other way up: After turning into a tabloid sensation as a serial killer, she’s despatched to Arkham, the place she’s brutalized each by her fellow inmates and the physicians tasked along with her care, regardless of her fixed, panicked protestations of her innocence. 

Over the course of the episode, Milioti painstakingly charts not solely Sofia’s descent into insanity, however the way it transforms her from an harmless (at the least, as a lot because the daughter of against the law kingpin might be) into the homicidal psychopath that she’d been wrongly accused of being. By the tip of the episode, again within the current day, Sofia calmly waits till her household is asleep within the Carmine mansion, after which pipes carbon monoxide all through the home, gassing all of them to loss of life — save her younger niece and the Falcone underboss, Johnny Viti (Michael Kelly).

Suffice it to say, even along with her standout work in tasks just like the acclaimed 2017 “Black Mirror” installment “USS Callister” and the 2020 sci-fi rom-com “Palm Springs,” “Cent’Anni” supplies Milioti with a tour-de-force showcase not like something she’s acquired earlier than.

“Selfishly, as an actor, I learn that episode and was like, ‘I can’t imagine I’m going to get to play all this stuff,’” she says. “It’s a full-course meal, and so they don’t come round on a regular basis. I positively felt an unlimited duty — and strain that I placed on myself — of wanting to do that justice.” 

To satisfy that ambition, she collaborated with motion coach Julia Crockett to work out how Sofia’s years in Arkham affected her physique. “She goes from one horrific place again into one other horrific place,” Milioti says, referencing Sofia’s return to her household after leaving Arkham. “What does that do to you when it’s a must to continuously be on guard and might’t have a single second’s breath?”

She additionally wished to seize how Sofia’s look transmutes from quiet luxurious pre-Arkham right into a intentionally garish veneer after she’s launched. “The ladies in that household, the one manner they categorical themselves is thru garments and hair and make-up,” Milioti says. “Should you take that manner of studying after which put it by Arkham, how does that come out? I actually wished her hair to be feral, however it may hidden when she was round her household. I wished it to go on this journey of her turning into increasingly more wild.”

Though Sofia’s post-Arkham look does evoke Talia Shire’s efficiency as Connie Corleone in “The Godfather,” Milioti says it wasn’t a aware selection. “I do keep in mind at one level pondering, ‘Oh, we’ve an analogous updo,’” she says with a chuckle. However she and “The Penguin” showrunner Lauren LeFranc did talk about Sofia’s similarities with a special character from the cinema basic, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino).

“Michael is that this golden youngster who is healthier at [organized crime] than perhaps he thought he was,” she says. “However that’s totally different from Sofia. Actually, she was the apple of her father’s eye till she wasn’t, however I feel she’s all the time recognized that she could be good at this, even when she had qualms about it. And, clearly, Arkham introduced that out extra.”

The larger problem for Milioti, nonetheless, was giving herself permission to make the sort of brazen decisions referred to as for within the script. Her co-star Deirdre O’Connell, who performs Oz’s mom, launched Milioti to the apply of watching different performances not for inspiration, however “for braveness” — like Gena Rowlands within the 1980 crime thriller “Gloria,” wherein she performs a gangster’s ex-girlfriend on the run with a younger boy.

“I had by no means seen that efficiency,” Milioti says. “That’s not Sofia, however simply watching somebody swing for the fences, simply actually go for it, [helped me] simply be like, ‘OK, have a look at what you are able to do.’”

Milioti additionally credit Helen Shaver, who directed Episode 4, for fostering an unusually collaborative atmosphere on set among the many background actors enjoying the opposite inmates at Arkham. “She sat with all of us and he or she was like, ‘I would like everybody right here to give you a personality. When Sofia walks by, I wish to see a person. I would like us all to make this world collectively,’” Milioti says with a shudder. “I’m getting chills eager about it. Once I’m strolling down these aisles of the mess corridor, I’m experiencing utterly totally different, terrifying individuals.” 

That sort of immersion made the second when Sofia lastly snaps and violently murders one other inmate, Magpie (Marié Botha), that rather more vivid and visceral. “They’re all screaming and banging on tables,” Milioti says. “It made it really feel like play. Everybody was in it collectively, so it could allow you to go to greater and larger locations with it.”

Milioti is loath, nonetheless, to dive into element about her appearing course of, just like the backstory of the scars that riddle Sofia’s physique. “I had my very own concepts of what all of them had been” is what she’ll reveal. “All this makes me look — I imply, I’m saying it, however it’s a little eye roll-y,” she says with a good-natured shrug. “I don’t prefer to examine, like, how actors determine issues out. I identical to to be within the magic of the factor. However I’m in all probability being overly treasured — which can be a really actorly factor to do.”

Actually, Milioti isn’t complaining. Removed from it. “I positively really feel spoiled,” she says of attending to play Sofia. “I felt like I used to be in my yard, a little bit child once more.” She breaks right into a radiant smile. “Sure, there’s darkness, however I had the time of my life.”