HBO’s ‘The Penguin’ Introduces The Next Great Batman Villain: Cristin Milioti’s Sofia Falcone

About halfway through the very first episode of HBO‘s The Penguin, a petite woman dressed in demure white manages to scare the shit out of the show’s titular mobster. Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti) enters the frame behind an oblivious Oswald “Oz” Cobb (Colin Farrell). He’s too busy spinning a yarn to the Falcone family’s new leaders to notice Sofia stalking him in the background. However as soon as he notices her, he’s on the defensive, stumbling over his words and nervously admitting he didn’t know she was out… “Of Arkham?” Sofia name drops infamous psychiatric hospital stuffed with Batman supervillains with a shark-like grin.

From that terrifying introduction, Cristin Milioti’s Sofia Falcone only becomes more unnerving, fascinating, and dangerous as The Penguin goes on. The series, created by Lauren LeFranc, ostensibly charts Oz’s rise to power as “The Penguin” in Gotham City’s underworld, but it’s Sofia Falcone that will claw under your skin alongside the great comic book villains of the screen. It’s not just that she eats with her hands and doesn’t flinch at murdering innocents; Sofia Falcone is iconic because of Cristin Milioti’s incendiary performance.

“Cristin was amazing,” Colin Farrell told Decider. “I thought she was amazing from the moment she walked on. She just owned it. She really inhabited it.”

“We’re so lucky to have her,” The Penguin showrunner Lauren LeFranc concurred. “What she’s done with Sofia is just so tremendous. I really, genuinely can’t wait for people to see what she’s doing, because she is hitting all these different tones and it’s a very hard thing to do as an actor.”

Part of what complicates matters even more is the fact that The Penguin takes place in the same world as Matt Reeves’s The Batman. Arguably one of the most grounded takes on the iconic DC superhero, that film established versions of Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson), Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), and Oz Cobb that could just as easily exist within our reality as in the pages of a comic book. That means that even though Sofia Falcone is capable of great depravity — she was initially shoved into Arkham because she was found to be a serial killer of woman, dubbed the “Hangman” — Milioti has to provide a performance that is far more nuanced than the typical campy supervillain turn.

“Lauren wrote this just gorgeous character where you definitely — or at least I do — I understand why she went mad,” Cristin Milioti told Decider. “Not that her actions are justifiable, but you get it. 

“She is doing horrific things. Like, she is. You know, she becomes a larger than life villain. But there’s like an asterisk because you get to see how they drove her mad.”

“I think one of my favorite things about Batman is how interchangeable Batman is with his villains. They’re all operating from the same place of, like, they can’t sit with what’s happened to them.”

Cristin Milioti

While Milioti is incredible as Sofia from the jump, the actress truly gets to take command of The Penguin in Episode 4, “Cent’anni,” which follows the crime princess’s backstory. We go ten years into the past, when Sofia shined as a Gotham City socialite, presiding over charity brunches and getting chauffeured around town by none other than Oz Cobb. When she’s thrown into Arkham, she is systemically broken down by the horrors she finds within.

“[Cristin] established the character in such a beautiful way in the first few episodes. That led to episode four, which is, you know, it’s totally hers,” Colin Farrell said. “It’s just extraordinary. And she’s just out there, brilliant, in Episode 4.”

“Then an amazing shift happens where she begins to inhabit this other character. She begins to — you know, you scream into the void long enough, be careful you don’t become the void, etc.— and she becomes that void.”

Like The Batman, The Penguin delights in both honoring its source material while also putting a twist on fans’ expectations. Comic book readers may be taken aback by how Milioti’s version of the character both aligns and differs from the Sofia we first met in the pages of Jeph Loeb’s The Long Halloween.

“When you look at Sofia, like, yeah, Sofia Falcone is connected in the ways that she is from Jeph Loeb, what they did in the comics,” Matt Reeves, executive producer of The Penguin, said. “But boy, she’s so very different in what Lauren chose to do with her.”

“You scream into the void long enough, be careful you don’t become the void, etc.— and she becomes that void.”

Colin Farrell

“I knew it made sense, to me anyway, that Sofia should exist in our show. In the comics, she’s the daughter of Carmine Falcone,” LeFranc said, referring to the John Turturro character whose death in The Batman sets up much of The Penguin‘s drama. “I really wanted to create an interesting, complex female character. And so she’s quite different than the way the comics have previously depicted her.”

“What Cristin can convey in one look is really stunning…She’s elevated Sofia off the page in an incredible way.”

By the time you finish all eight episodes of The Penguin, you won’t just be blown away by Milioti’s performance, but left wondering if Sofia Falcone can even be categorized as a “Batman villain” in the traditional sense of the label. The Penguin‘s version Sofia is that complex. And it’s something that Milioti savored about the role.

“I think one of my favorite things about Batman is how interchangeable Batman is with his villains. They’re all operating from the same place of, like, they can’t sit with what’s happened to them,” Milioti said.

“I mean, obviously some are different. Joker is just like Joker, but there’s like a real seeking out of vengeance against the ways in which they perceived society having wronged them on some level, right?” Milioti continued. “[Batman’s] also running around in a giant suit looking for fights.”

“They’re all just kind of like looking to hurt in order to put their hurt somewhere.”

The Penguin premieres tonight on HBO and Max at 9 PM ET/PT.