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How The Penguin Became the Sofia Falcone Show
Cristin Milioti thought through every motivation, music cue, and mullet option to craft the most sympathetic psychopath on TV.
Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb gets naming rights to the Batman spinoff series The Penguin, but Cristin Milioti’s Sofia Falcone steals the show. As the mob-boss daughter who ascends to the top of her father’s criminal organization after killing most of her family, Milioti injects Sofia’s rise with a feral fervor honed after a decade imprisoned in an asylum: shoving handfuls of pasta into her mouth, puffing on three cigarettes at once, skipping through the family mansion after poisoning her relatives. The actress has bounced around in various genres over her decadeslong career — from sitcom stints on 30 Rock, How I Met Your Mother, and Mythic Quest to roles in organized-crime narratives like Fargo, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Sopranos — but few roles have given her the opportunity to tear into a character the way she does with Sofia, whom Milioti plays like a crushed hothouse flower slowly blooming again.
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