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

Cristin Milioti has grown pretty accustomed to the superhero observe and dance. After launching her career in 2011 alongside together with her Tony-nominated operate in “As quickly as” and in 2013 as a result of the Mother throughout the remaining season of “How I Met Your Mother,” the New Jersey native began making the rounds for the handful of roles accessible to women in comic information variations.

“Oh my God, if there’s anyone spherical my age in it … I’ve examined for, like, you title it,” the 39-year-old says with a watch mounted roll. “I merely couldn’t get in there — not for lack of making an attempt.”

So in 2022, when Milioti was approached about having fun with the unhinged mobster Sofia Falcone in “The Penguin” — starring Colin Farrell as Oz Cobb, the operate he originated in Matt Reeves’ 2022 blockbuster “The Batman” — she was understandably cautious of extra disappointment. “I was making an attempt to take care of my expectations throughout the basement,” she tells Choice. “I’d dreamed of having fun with a villain my full life.”

Not solely did Milioti land the half, nonetheless she’s earned just a few of her best-ever critiques for her ferocious effectivity as Sofia, who’s launched merely 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 administration of Gotham Metropolis’s underworld, Sofia takes coronary heart stage in its fourth episode, entitled “Cent’Anni,” which debuted Oct. 13. The current jumps once more to solely sooner than Sofia’s incarceration, and ultimately reveals the true story behind the Hangman’s crimes — and what occurred to Sofia in Arkham. 

It appears that evidently Sofia’s father, Carmine (Mark Sturdy), is the true Hangman, and one in all his victims was Sofia’s mother — a revelation Sofia entails after she’s confronted by a dogged reporter with proof that numerous women who labored in Carmine’s distinctive membership, 44 Beneath, had been all strangled to lack of life. Oz, who in the intervening 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 fallacious questions on how her mother died. 

On a dime, Carmine — who’d merely started to see Sofia as his true heir apparent, comparatively than his ineffectual son, Alberto (Michael Zegen) — prompts his daughter. He has the reporter murdered, crops proof with corrupt Gotham PD officers to frame Sofia for the Hangman murders, and compels the rest of Sofia’s family, aside from Alberto, to offer false testimony that Sofia is mentally unwell and dangerous. In a single day, Sofia’s posh and privileged life turns the opposite means up: After turning right into a tabloid sensation as a serial killer, she’s despatched to Arkham, the place she’s brutalized every by her fellow inmates and the physicians tasked alongside together with her care, no matter her mounted, panicked protestations of her innocence. 

Over the course of the episode, Milioti painstakingly charts not solely Sofia’s descent into madness, nonetheless the best way it transforms her from an innocent (in any case, as so much as a result of the daughter of towards the legislation kingpin is perhaps) into the homicidal psychopath that she’d been wrongly accused of being. By the tip of the episode, once more throughout the present day, Sofia calmly waits until her family is asleep throughout the Carmine mansion, after which pipes carbon monoxide all by the house, gassing all of them to lack of life — save her youthful niece and the Falcone underboss, Johnny Viti (Michael Kelly).

Suffice it to say, even alongside together with her standout work in duties identical to 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 not like one thing she’s acquired sooner than.

“Selfishly, as an actor, I study that episode and was like, ‘I can’t think about I’m going to get to play all these items,’” she says. “It’s a full-course meal, and they also don’t come spherical regularly. I positively felt an infinite responsibility — and pressure that I positioned 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 physique. “She goes from one horrific place once more into one different horrific place,” Milioti says, referencing Sofia’s return to her family after leaving Arkham. “What does that do to you when it’s a should to constantly be on guard and would possibly’t have a single second’s breath?”

She moreover wished to grab how Sofia’s look transmutes from quiet luxurious pre-Arkham proper right into a deliberately garish veneer after she’s launched. “The women in that family, the one method they categorical themselves is through clothes and hair and make-up,” Milioti says. “Do you have to take that method of learning after which put it by Arkham, how does that come out? I really wished her hair to be feral, nonetheless it might hidden when she was around her family. I wanted it to go on this journey of her turning into more and more extra wild.”

Although Sofia’s post-Arkham look does evoke Talia Shire’s effectivity as Connie Corleone in “The Godfather,” Milioti says it wasn’t a conscious choice. “I do remember at one degree pondering, ‘Oh, we’ve an identical updo,’” she says with a chuckle. Nevertheless she and “The Penguin” showrunner Lauren LeFranc did discuss Sofia’s similarities with a particular character from the cinema primary, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino).

“Michael is that this golden teenager who’s more healthy at [organized crime] than maybe he thought he was,” she says. “Nevertheless that’s completely totally different from Sofia. Truly, she was the apple of her father’s eye until she wasn’t, nonetheless I really feel she’s on a regular basis acknowledged that she might be good at this, even when she had qualms about it. And, clearly, Arkham launched that out additional.”

The bigger drawback for Milioti, nonetheless, was giving herself permission to make the kind of brazen choices known as for throughout the script. Her co-star Deirdre O’Connell, who performs Oz’s mother, launched Milioti to the apply of watching totally different performances not for inspiration, nonetheless “for braveness” — like Gena Rowlands throughout the 1980 crime thriller “Gloria,” whereby she performs a gangster’s ex-girlfriend on the run with a youthful boy.

“I had in no way seen that effectivity,” Milioti says. “That’s not Sofia, nonetheless merely watching anyone swing for the fences, merely really go for it, [helped me] merely be like, ‘OK, take a look at what you’ll be able to do.’”

Milioti moreover credit score Helen Shaver, who directed Episode 4, for fostering an unusually collaborative environment on set among the many many background actors having fun with the other inmates at Arkham. “She sat with all of us and she or he was like, ‘I would really like everyone proper right here to offer you a character. When Sofia walks by, I want to see an individual. I would really like us all to make this world collectively,’” Milioti says with a shudder. “I’m getting chills keen about it. As soon as I’m strolling down these aisles of the mess hall, I’m experiencing totally completely totally different, terrifying people.” 

That kind of immersion made the second when Sofia lastly snaps and violently murders one different inmate, Magpie (Marié Botha), that quite extra vivid and visceral. “They’re all screaming and banging on tables,” Milioti says. “It made it actually really feel like play. All people was in it collectively, so it may let you go to better and bigger places with it.”

Milioti is loath, nonetheless, to dive into ingredient about her showing course of, identical to the backstory of the scars that riddle Sofia’s physique. “I had my very personal ideas of what all of them had been” is what she’ll reveal. “All this makes me look — I suggest, I’m saying it, nonetheless it’s a little bit eye roll-y,” she says with a good-natured shrug. “I don’t desire to look at, like, how actors decide points out. I similar to to be throughout the magic of the issue. Nevertheless I’m most likely being overly treasured — which is usually a actually actorly issue to do.”

Truly, Milioti isn’t complaining. Faraway from it. “I positively actually really feel spoiled,” she says of attending to play Sofia. “I felt like I was in my yard, a little bit bit little one as soon as extra.” She breaks proper right into a radiant smile. “Certain, there’s darkness, nonetheless I had the time of my life.”