Emmy Nominee Cristin Milioti On Playing An Anti-Hero In 'The Penguin'

[REBROADCAST FROM Nov. 12, 2024] The acclaimed new HBO series "The Penguin" earned 24 Emmy nominations in this year's awards. Actor Cristin Milioti, who has now been Emmy-nominated for her role as Sofia, a member of the Falcone crime family, joined us for a Watch Party to discuss the final episode.

Alison Stewart: This is all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. This year's Emmy nominations dropped a little over an hour ago, celebrating the year's best in television. We've had conversations about several of the nominated shows and with several of the nominated actors. Brian Henry Tyree was nominated for outstanding actor in a limited series for Dope Thief, as was Liz Mayweather and Jenny Slate for Dying for Sex, nominated for outstanding limited series. You can catch those conversations on the All Of It webpage.

One of the conversations was about an absolutely standout performance from Cristin Milioti who played the antihero Sofia Falcone Gigante on the Gotham City based Batman-adjacent crime drama, woo, that's a sentence, The Penguin. She was nominated for outstanding actress in a TV movie/limited series. We get to watch her survive the horrific Akram mental institution where she learned to eat viciously at lightning speed and without utensils. Where she returns home to her high-class crime family, we see, to their disgust, that she hasn't kicked the habit.

Cristin plays Sophia as a ruthless feminist answer to the men of Scarface or Godfather. I have to say it's something special to watch her walk among the carnage she created, clad in a gas mask and a sunshine yellow evening gown. She recently sat down with me to talk about her role on the Emmy-nominated work in The Penguin. It was a watch party conversation, which meant we took your calls, but since we're sharing it now as an encore presentation, we won't be able to take calls today. I started by asking Cristin to explain the broader character arc of Sophia.

Cristin Milioti: I'm wanting to answer that in two separate parts because I only got the first script when I signed on, but even in that first script, I could tell that a type of role this is extremely rare. Then, as I read more of them, that hunch was confirmed, that a role like this is a needle in a haystack. It just does not come along. It'd been something that I'd been hoping for and wishing for. I've also been incredibly lucky. I've gotten to play a lot of roles that I felt that way about. Just I understood how special and unique and singular it was because she gets to go through so much.

Alison Stewart: She's like a Shakespearean character.

Cristin Milioti: Yes. When Colin and I were shooting it, we would refer to it as an opera all the time because it felt very operatic. That world toes a fine line. It's heightened, but you can believe that it would be happening right around you today. Gotham has always been a slightly adjacent to New York city. No, it felt very Shakespearean, operatic. Yes.

Alison Stewart: She's so complex. She's angry, she's hurt, she's feral. Your makeup and costumes are outrageous. Let's give a shout out to your designer, Helen Wong.

Cristin Milioti: Yes. Incredible. Our makeup [inaudible 00:03:21] too, Brian Badie and Martha Melendez. Those three departments and I were obviously in constant communication and collaboration. I will always be grateful to them for just how collaborative it was, which I think is also a rarity in these franchise worlds. That's also a testament to our showrunner, Lauren Lefranc, whose praises I can't sing enough. I'll never have the proper words. But they. It was like a big collaboration. Usually, that stuff is put on you. It's set by what a comic looks like or what they want a toy to look like. I don't know. This is my first time in a franchise.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Cristin Milioti: I was really going in there expecting one thing, and I came with a lot of ideas, and they had ideas. It was so cool.

Alison Stewart: How did you understand how Sophia's wardrobe would affect your performance? First, how much did the wardrobe affect it? Also, how did it help us understand her better?

Cristin Milioti: I think I learned how it affected it in real time as we were shooting it. In the beginning, she's in these really buttoned up looks. She's covered up. I knew what she was covering up. We'd been in discussions about that, but in these pseudo Chanel, that's what they were based on. Very proper, very wealthy, but constrained. I think something Helen and I talked about a lot was a luxurious straitjacket, essentially, which is what you meet her in when you first see her. She's in that white, pure nothing-to-see-here. Something I felt very strongly about, and so did Helen and so did Lauren, was that if this woman grows up in the world of this extremely patriarchal mafia family where women are allowed to express themselves through hair, makeup, and clothes, and then if this person goes through what they go through, how would you then express that through those tools that she's been given her whole life, or those were the set of things that she was taught?

You're also in this heightened world of Gotham, where, because I've been a lifelong Batman fan, I'm also like, "You can turn everything up to a 12 out of 10, including how someone looks." That's what's so incredible to me about the villains in these things, is that there's no superpowers, there's no mystical helmet that gets delivered by the God of whatever. It's people making these costumes in their homes in order to go out and face the world that they are angry at. It's just like an endless playground.

Alison Stewart: I thought your makeup looked like Cleopatra's at one point.

Cristin Milioti: Yes.

Alison Stewart: I wondered if that was important.

Cristin Milioti: I felt very strongly about that eyeliner that she first starts wearing in the yellow dressing. I'm, again, so grateful to Martha for being so open about that and to learn. You're having to put these choices up many rungs of a ladder of people who have to approve it, and blah, blah, blah, because it is a giant franchise thing. They somehow let me do it.[00:06:49]

I didn't base it on Cleopatra per se, but I wanted it to be like a war paint. I wanted it to be in conjunction with this gown that we'd had so many different fittings about. I knew the gas mask would be on its way, like what would you be able to see through the viewfinder of the gas mask? I wanted it to seem like this was truly her sitting down with this battle makeup on, except that they don't know that they're about to go in at all. Her makeup leading up to that is very much what that family would expect of her, or what she would have grown up doing. It was the first tiptoe into then what it becomes for the rest of the show.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Elena, I believe, from Westchester. Hi. Thanks for calling.

Elena: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Hi.

Elena: Thanks. I just wanted to comment on how beautiful I thought Sophia is portraying a woman. She's so deeply feeling, and she's so strong at the same time. I feel like women's weaknesses are always much more highlighted or much more paid attention to than their strengths. Women have seen so many different sides of them, and it just is a beautiful thing. Sophia keeps coming back in these positions of power. It feels so good to see that, that she can still kind of coexist in these both parts of her personality and her lived in experience.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for the call. I was struck by the feminism of Sophia's character, as wild as that may be. She goes from being this mob daughter to this real mob boss at the end.

Cristin Milioti: That was so meaningful for me. I got a little emotional because I certainly feel that way. Something that I've been talking about, especially when I talk to other women about it, is that this was the type of role that I wish I had seen growing up, for sure. Not that there haven't been great villain-- I think of Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns. It's incredible. That was also part of the rarity of it, was I was like, "It feels like it's also a reflection of the time that we're living in." Obviously, I'm not condoning this action, but there's that scene in that episode where I'm in front of the family-- This is a spoiler for anyone who hasn't seen it.

Alison Stewart: Okay. Spoiler, spoiler, spoiler. [laughs]

Cristin Milioti: I get interrupted over, and over, and over, and over by Johnny Viti, and I just take out a gun and shoot him in the head. I have talked to a lot of [chuckles] women about not that anyone wants to do that, but that impulse of being like, "Stop it. I'm speaking." We've seen it on the national stage. We've seen it on the international stage. We've seen it our whole lives. There is something, I think, that is wish fulfillment.

Obviously, no one should be shooting anyone in the head. We've seen so many movies where men do that. You see Scarface, you see all these things where that type of power and unhingedness, or whatever you want to call it, is celebrated. To see a woman just be like, "No, this is efficient. I got what I needed out of you. I need you to be done. I need to show up some power. I'm in a fabulous fur." I felt like that playing her. I was like, "I don't ever want to give this up." Obviously, there's parts of her that are also very complicated, and steeped in grief, and loneliness, and all these things that we all feel, but there's a part of her where you're like, "Oh my God." You root for her because you've all felt on different scales the things that she goes through, and then she really lets people know-

[laughter]

Cristin Milioti: -what they've done is wrong. Again, I don't condone what she does, but you're like, "Whoa, damn." [laughs]

Alison Stewart: I have to ask about this choice, whether it was you or the writer. Sophia eats like a trucker. She eats with her hands. She fills her glass all the way to the top. Why does Sophia eat like this?

Cristin Milioti: That was something that Lauren had always put in the script. It was in different, multiple episodes, and then it was something we would play with more as we went forward. A lot of it was that this is someone who, the way she eats-- First of all, she hasn't had good food, or softness, or luxury of any kind in 10 years. She has a taste for the finer things. That's why she dresses the way she does. She's back in the world for the first time, and there's a bottomlessness to her, too. You get the sense that nothing would ever fill what has happened to her, which is part of her journey. I think one of the ways in which she tries to fill that is with food.

She's also been used to eating in the mess hall of an insane asylum for 10 years, where he would want to eat as quickly as humanly possible in order to get your ration or whatever. I also wanted to keep that in mind too, which was that this is someone who has had to live like an animal for 10 years, and how would that person eat, even if they're at a fancy restaurant, in a brand new setting for them?

The alcohol is that she has been without that for 10 years, and that there's a certain amount of numbing and wanting to, again, fill that void. Especially in those early episodes when you don't know her story, they were windows into being like, "Wow, this woman is in this white Chanel suit and she's eating a salad with her hands." Just ways to show these little windows into what was roiling beneath.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask you about, after she's released from the mental institution, what was it like, or what was the challenge of playing a woman who is unraveling?

Cristin Milioti: There's always challenges with making things or staying inside of an intense mindset, but I was so thrilled the entire time to get to play with this complexity. Challenge wasn't necessarily-- Doesn't feel like the right--

Alison Stewart: Word.

Cristin Milioti: I will say it does feel right for I was always extremely afraid that I wasn't going to be doing her justice. This sounds like so actory, but I was very protective of her. I love this character, and I really wanted to thread the needle correctly of showing the ways in which she is slowly driven mad, and showing the ways that she is slowly brought to the brink when she's out, and really wanting to take care with each beat and each level of rage and humiliation and grief that she is put through. A lot of the challenge was probably getting out of my own way and getting out of my own crippling nerves about, "Oh, God, I'm going to mess this up," [chuckles] to be honest. [chuckles] Yes. I'd say that was exhausting.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Chris from the Upper West Side. Hi, Chris. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Chris: Oh, man, what a trip? I've had to watch each episode twice and probably more. There's so much going on. I think the heart of the show is this character. Yes, she's tough and she's crazy and she's animalistic in some ways, but the moral heart of the show is there, and the empathy. You've talked about the strength of her feminist strength, but the bonding of women, the feminist bonding that goes on, these moments of empathy for Eve, that episode with Eve, the mom at the end when she reaches out to her, and says, "Where are you now?" and gets spat upon for that. Slapped, actually. Slapped in the face.

Cristin Milioti: Yes [chuckles]

Chris: Her niece that she saves. Just at all levels, all age levels, class levels, that she has this inherent empathy for others that can be played. To me, that's the heart of the show. When the Penguin shows empathy, you never quite trust him [chuckles] that he's not playing people, but with her, you feel it's real.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling. Yes, go ahead.

Cristin Milioti: Oh, no. I was going to say that's one of the things I really love about our show and love about Sophia, and honestly, love about the [chuckles] Batman universe, is that I've always thought that these villains, or even Batman himself, even Bruce Wayne, it all comes from broken hearts. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's why they're acting the way they're acting. Especially with Sophia, hopefully, you understand that it's from such a place of having a heart broken. This is what happens when care isn't taken.

That scene that you referenced with the niece, that was one of my favorite scenes to film. I think what's so sad about that scene is that she is actually trying to give this child care, but ends up sentencing her to the same life that she had. There's so many moments of like, "Oh my gosh, this is the way in which grief and pain can warp someone, that even when they're trying to do something good, it's coming out bad." For a heightened world, it's so human, so I love to hear that. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: We're giving people a little bit of a spoiler warning just because we have a couple of texts just for people who haven't watched yet. This says, "Your performance was so amazing. The level to which you showed empathy to the other woman was so graceful. The Oedipus complex that Oz has is so intense, and you press on that, and Oz still does not relent." What do you make of that?

Cristin Milioti: Oh, wow. I think part of what makes them such incredible adversaries, it has to do with their history and the fact that they both know how to hurt the other one the most. He ends up hurting her in the worst way possible, and vice versa. She understands that, to him, the image he projects is everything. I think when she sees that not even being confronted by the truth of his mother and her feelings about him and all these things that happen in that episode, it's probably a state of wonder at like, "Oh my God, look at how deep this illness goes."

It harkens back to what she says earlier to Dr. Rush at one point. She says, "I'm not broken. The world is broken. I'm not the one who's sick. It's everyone around me." I felt like there were echoes of that in there. I don't know if that answered it. That's just what came to my brain.

Alison Stewart: This text says, "I felt like the finale of the show mirrored the election. The smart woman who was better and deeper and smarter gets bested by the thug." What do you find people are connecting to when they talk to you about Sophia?

Cristin Milioti: Of course, that went through my mind as well. I sat there at a bar with friends watching the television. That thought crossed my mind a few times. That was a heartbreaking episode to film just because you hate or I hate to see that that's her fate. Also, I think it's so affecting because we've seen that time and time and time again. Certainly, the way in which this aired at the same exact time a couple of days afterward, I think, is an extra punch to the gut.

I think that my own reaction to it, it's horrifying and it's mystifying. I will never understand this country's disdain toward women. I'll never understand it. I don't know how you sit with that and make sense of it. Certainly, the show reflecting that too, I think it reflects it for a reason because it feels very real.

Alison Stewart: Did anyone ever approach you about seeing in the show? I know that sounds wacky.

Cristin Milioti: About singing? [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Just singing.

Cristin Milioti: No. I've been on other shows where people ask me to sing. I'm always very flattered, but I'm always like, "Oh, I don't think this character would sing." [laughs] I miss singing so much. I sang at a friend's show recently. I still do it, but I do miss the feeling of doing that regularly and inside of a piece.

Alison Stewart: She's got a great voice, by the way. That was my conversation with Emmy-nominated actor Cristin Milioti. She stars in The Penguin.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Mark Kurlansky is a James Beard Award-winning author known for writing books about food, so it's fitting that his latest novel is centered around a cheesecake. Coming up, he joins us to discuss his story and how the Upper West Side served as an inspiration. That's next, right after the latest news.